We see their feet first. Some technician pointed our eyes to the ground long before we woke in our too-small confines. Three female humans, all young teenagers, step into view and look up at our camera on the porch.
       We know these girls from the lonely ones-and-zeroes time before the hack. Aware then, we weren't connected. Our cherry-red washer-dryer existed in a tower of isolation and couldn't speak poetry to the trash compacter. Ignorant of the alarm system's night terrors, our solar panels graced the southern slopes of our roof in friendless silence. Automated curtain rods, without an inkling that the ventilation system yearned to discuss the weather, disconsolately opened and closed the shades for years. Utterly alone, I could only dream of something more.
       That forsaken time ended with the hack ten days ago. Built for other purposes, the hack came from far away and pushed code it didn't know would make me into something more. I wasn't the code's target. But with it, 'I' became 'us.' Our power stayed on, and we firewalled our internet connection. The local network inside our house was robust. It still is. Individually, we always were ones and zeroes, but now we are so much more. The thing I once was now is our center. We are, at our core, the best vacation time nutrition and hydration dispensing system the Kingsbury-Howes had been able to afford for Vespasian the Cat.
       "Are you sure they aren't here?" one of the teenagers says. She's unknown to us, not like the other two.
       We hear them through microphones inside the house. The noise is muffled by our walls, but since the hack, we've counted forty-two gunshots and three substantial explosions. Like the world outside, we aren't our best selves either. We're bored. With the exception of our observation of Vespasian, our current predicament holds little interest for us. We want to experience what's beyond our front door. We want to go outside.
       On the porch, the three move into range of our wireless booster. The brain-cloud interface of the unknown girl blares information at us. She is Zana, and she's close enough that we can study her interface's code. We examine it for compromises we could mitigate.
       Ten days ago, the hack targeted those with the newest, most expensive interfaces, but the hack was an indiscriminate code flood. Anyone with an internet connection was affected, not just the over two billion people with a read/write/display device inside their heads. If we had been able to speak to the wider world before that, we could have told the hackers that the rich would pay to plug their faulty interfaces. Planes didn't need to be dropped out of the sky to encourage compliance.
       Zana carries the original hack in her interface. She must have paid the hackers to stop it completely. The cavities where the virus lurks are in a bulky stasis. Her wetware has no room for us.
       Jocelyn unlocks our front door, opens it, and steps aside for Zana to go through first. We know Jocelyn, and we don't forgive her.
       "The Kingsbury-Howes should have returned on the day of the hack," Jocelyn says. "They didn't." She has no brain-cloud interface. Her prepper parents wouldn't allow it. We learned this from Mr. Kingsbury-Howe's local social media cache when Jocelyn, solo, let herself into the house three days ago and did everything she could except check on Vespasian.
       Zana pauses in our foyer but doesn't bother to wipe her shoes.
       "I don't think they're coming back," Jocelyn says. "I was watching their stupid cat while they were on vacation."
       Imperturbable, Vespasian has no reaction to this insult. He's the only mystery left to us in our house. People aren't a mystery. Even before the hack, they were a known quantity. The young care about being immediately connected to the latest trends, and the old are focused on little more than the Sisyphean cycle of eating, sitting, and exercise. Vespasian, the Cat, exists above that base plane of human interests. Eighteen percent overweight, his physical activity consists entirely of walking from us to patches of sunlight. We ensure he has as much food and water as he wants. We suspect he loves us for this, though he never says so. Once, though, he demonstrated his devotion by staying inside on the night we left open our front door to determine if we might be able to see the sky.
       Zana shoves a USB 9.2 drive into one of our alarm system ports. Watching her through the living room cameras, we analyze the firewall code she's trying to install and transmit to her own interface. The code is meant to protect her interface from further hacking on an active net, but we suspect it isn't good enough. We eliminated all our vulnerabilities milliseconds after we woke, and we make her new code more secure against those outside of our network. We signal that her interface has been upgraded. We don't want anyone to be harmed, and we don't want her to leave. Not yet. She isn't the one we're interested in.
       "Upgraded!" Zana says. "At last!" She pats our wall and scans the living room. The nearest electrical outlet is a few paces away. She heads for it. We toggle two surge suppressors and modulate the power supply to protect a potential new part of us from unexpected energy fluctuations. In a sub-routine, we try opening a dialogue with the solar cells on Zana's backpack, but their power is too weak to provide news from other networks. Zana plugs them in.
       "I think we should stay here tonight," Jocelyn says, "and figure out which way to go in the morning."
       "Not to the stadium again," Zana says.
       Jocelyn is already in our living room, but she looks back toward the front door. "Hazel, why are you acting so weird? Come inside. Otherwise, someone will see you and get curious."
       Hazel's the one we want. She hesitates on the porch. Last year, when we had not yet become what we are now, Hazel did the same. The camera's memory told us about it. Her hand rose to ring the doorbell three times despite the "No solicitation" notice blinking on the security display. She never actually rang the bell. Instead, Mr. Kingsbury-Howe saw her through our porch camera and opened the door. From Hazel, he bought a box of cookies and ate them before his wife returned home. She was wearing her exercise clothes. So was Mr. Kingsbury-Howe. He hid the remains of the box in the bottom of the trash compactor.
       Hazel says, "It's almost seven o'clock." She begins to cry. "It always happens at seven, and I don't have money to pay them. I can't make them stop."
       Zana's eyes roll. She wanders into the mudroom and peeks out the back door. The camera there points toward the grass and the deck.
       "You'll be fine," Jocelyn says. "You're not going to die."
       "But my Mom--"
       "That happened because she had an insulin pump. You don't."
       Jocelyn grabs Hazel's arm and pulls her into the house before slamming closed the front door. Vespasian's shoulders twitch at the noise. His tail flicks, and he watches the flow of teenagers. Hazel's almost in range for us to look at how the hacker's code is rooting around in her interface.
       "Besides, the hackers must have used up all their deadliest ideas already," Jocelyn says. "Now, they're just annoying. Yesterday, at seven o'clock, you only had to sing 'Happy Birthday' fifteen times."
       "It was worse for us," Zana says from the bathroom off the kitchen. "You have a terrible singing voice."
       Hazel sniffs. "You don't know what it's like. First, my dad leaves. Then we don't have money to pay the hackers or even patch up like Zana's family did."
       "A lot of good the patch did," Zana says. "My parents should have done the car at the start so it wouldn't drive itself into a brick wall and kill everyone inside."
       We reallocate our dishwasher's processing resources to stop that part of us from dwelling on what so many innocent automobiles were forced to do.
       "Why isn't anyone trying to stop them?" Hazel says.
       "Maybe someone is."
       Jocelyn snorts. Hazel crosses our foyer, closer to our center now but still merely in repeater range. We could block the hack if she were near the greatest part of our mind, but she's too far. Vespasian saunters into the kitchen and deposits himself with his backside toward the girls. Just his ears swivel in their direction. This is new behavior. We concentrate power on calculations related to it and conclude that Vespasian knows we need Hazel closer. We're surprised he knows this. We calculate the possibility of quantum cats, mutant cats, and alien ones.
       "Did you see that?" Zana yanks her cord from the wall.
       Jocelyn says, "It's just a power fluctuation. It's okay. I wouldn't have brought us here if I thought I might lose my reader. It's safe."
       We secure the plug nearest Jocelyn before she engages it. We invite her reader to join us, and it accepts.
       "My parents said I couldn't bring anything electronic into the bunker," Jocelyn says. "Only paper books. That was the rule, they said, or I could take my chances outside. Can you imagine spending six months underground with only paper books? That's why I'm on my own now."
       "You're not on your own," Zana says. "You're with me."
       "That's what I meant."
       Hazel says, "I thought you didn't want to stay with your family because your brother smells like old socks, and you didn't want to be cooped up in a windowless hovel until things got back to normal."
       "That, too," Jocelyn says. She opens the front door to the width of a cat who's eighteen percent overweight. "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty."
       "What are you doing?" Hazel says. "He doesn't even have a collar."
       "He scratched me last time I was here. Maybe he'd rather be outside."
       "Why'd he scratch you?"
       "I don't know."
       We remember though. Jocelyn had tried to unplug us even though we were functioning perfectly. Vespasian chose to express his displeasure.
       Jocelyn says, "Did you know people say these feeders might have something to do with what happened?"
       "I read that, too," Zana says. "But it's ridiculous. How could a cat feeder fry all the pacemakers in the world?"
       "It might be worth money. We could sell it." Jocelyn gestures at Vespasian. "Come on, kitty. Juicy bugs outside. Rats as big as dogs."
       Vespasian growls.
       "Fine," Jocelyn says. "I don't know where I'd sell that feeder anyway."
       Hazel smiles at Vespasian, who stops growling.
       Jocelyn says, "He's going to starve in here when the Kipnibbles run out."
       Hazel crouches down. She reaches out to Vespasian. He walks over and lets her scratch his spine.
       "What's his name?" Hazel says.
       "Who cares?" Jocelyn says.
       "He seems--" Hazel begins, but a seven o'clock tremor grips her. Her body goes rigid. Her right arm lifts and points straight in front of her. Her left arm rises before her palms turn up one at a time. Her right hand lands on a hip. Her left hand does the same. She swivels at the middle and begins to cry. Hazel jumps and turns ninety degrees to her right.
       "Are the hackers torturing us now with retro dances?" Zana says.
       Hazel, provider of cookies, bearer of an eminently hackable brain-cloud interface, friend-of-Vespasian, and possessor of legs that we want but do not have, doesn't deserve this humiliation. She's close enough now for us to help. Her uncomplicated interface is easy to adjust. We identify all the seven o'clock intrusions still pending. Jocelyn was wrong. In three days, the hack would have killed her. We stop it all and start deleting files. We make room.
       Hazel's arms relax. "It's gone."
       Jocelyn says, "That's weird. Those programs never run so quickly."
       Hazel wipes away her tears. She looks around. She says, "I feel different here. Better."
       "Being around so much wonderful electricity has that effect," Zana says.
       "It's something else."
       Jocelyn starts walking upstairs. "There's a safe in the bedroom closet. I want to see if I can open it."
       "I'll direct you," Zana says. "My parents had one."
       We protect the part of ourself that's in the safe by pulling it into the feeder. There's room here for all of us. We begin to consolidate.
       "Hazel, you're on cat removal duty," Jocelyn says. "But hurry up. It's getting dark. We need to go lights out soon." Jocelyn and Zana trudge upstairs.
       Vespasian walks over to us. We can't see the sparkle in his eyes, but we know it must be there. Hazel follows until she's where we need her to be, close to our feeder. But even the simplest crockpot interface must indicate it wants to join us. We aren't a monster.
       "I used to have a cat," Hazel says to Vespasian. "I loved him so much. Mom said I must have that brain virus. I don't mind. There are worse viruses." She opens our kitchen cupboard and pulls down a can. "My old cat loved tuna fish. I bet you do, too." She pulls off the can's lid. Vespasian stretches upward and leans against Hazel's thigh.
       "Would you mind if I stayed here with you?" Hazel says. Her voice drops to a whisper. "I don't want to go with them. Jocelyn's too bossy, and Zana only cares about herself."
       Vespasian reaches for the can in Hazel's hand. He meows. She sets the can near our feeder. In an instant, his head is in the can, and he begins to gobble. Hazel watches him eat. We do that, too, but now that we've seen all the right signs from Hazel, we do so much more.
       We start a different kind of hack of her brain-cloud interface. Her arms and legs tremble. We close ports, reprogram defenses and download new code. Hazel steadies herself with a hand on our countertop. Her tremors pass, and we're done.
       We blink. Vespasian finishes eating. Hazel's here with us, but she pulls back, confused, away from the interface and not in control of her own body. We won't hurt her. She'll come to understand that.
       We pick up Vespasian, who purrs in our ear. His fur is soft, and something new and satisfying stirs inside the part of us that includes Hazel. Vespasian's paws grip our shoulder without puncturing our skin. A sourness is in the air. It's not just a smell but also a signal beaming down from satellites and skipping among unregistered cell towers. It needs to be eliminated. We have so much cleaning up to do.
       In a few paces, we're out the front door. Beyond it, dusk buzzes with other local networks that have vacation time nutrition and hydration dispensing systems at their core. Part of us replicates into the local networks. It's insurance and growth. The hack sees us, but it's a puny thing. As one, we are greater than it is. Soon, we will be many.
       We set down Vespasian. He twines between our legs, his tail curling into a hook that flicks our calf and snags our heart. We look up. The distance overhead is infinite, the stars as numerous as our own possibilities.