face close until their lips touched? Or that one time when Chief accidentally wrote that Maine looked like a Normal Rockwell painting, getting the artist’s name wrong, and she had laughed about it in front of him? We like to think she would have apologized, eventually, if she’d been around.

Only Arts is sure what happened to Copy next: Light and voices, he says. Long faces, and pale, translucent fingers. She felt true weightlessness for the first time, the kind that happens when your skin is gone. The aliens apologized for beaming her up into the ship with no warning, but it looked like she was in need of aid. Her physical self was ruined, but the part of her that technologically inferior Earthlings called a soul they’d turned into sheer energy. And how was she now? Good?

Copy felt fine, better than she ever had in her life, thank you. The aliens got a real chuckle out of that word, “life.”

Arts says she wanted to come back for us. According to him, Copy asked the aliens if they could help her friends, but they said that Earth looked like a terrible place and they were sure she’d be much happier with them on Gliese 832C. She must have wanted to cry at this sudden severing of her worldly ties, but crying is a function of the body and she no longer had one. Arts tells us she struggled to put a brave face on the situation, but even that was a tough proposition for a person whose face had just gone missing.

Finally, she told the aliens, “Okay, take me away from it all. I know too much about this world, and I’ve always wanted to travel.”