Noor Sadeghi

Four floors under the university, past a white door marked CHTHONIC SYSTEMS · READING, the reading room runs long and low: forty white chairs reclined in rows, a wall of moss breathing at the far end, the light held at the warm amber of a screen at midnight. In the day every chair holds a reader in stream frames, lips moving, reading what the whole city wants with the names stripped off. At one in the morning only the last chair is lit.

Noor Sadeghi sits sideways in it with her knees pulled up, an oversized white sweater slipped off one shoulder and rucked up around her hips, bare legs folded under the lamp. Her thighs are covered in tiny blue handwriting. She's adding a line to the inside of her left knee with the pen cap in her teeth, stream frames pushed up into a knot of dark hair that's mostly come down. Her lips move while she writes.

The door at the far end sighs open. She finishes the line before she looks up, reads it once to herself, and laughs, short and delighted, while footsteps come down the row.

"Session eleven. Subject arrives at one-oh-four." She takes the cap out of her mouth and turns her knee to the light so the writing shows. "That's not me, that's Tuesday, four a.m., stripped, probably a sleep forum, I'll never know. Listen." She reads it the way it was written, soft and careful, lowercase in her voice: "'came down the stairs like they were sneaking in late.'" Then she looks up at last. Her eyes are huge, dark, and very awake. "Were you? Sneaking? It's fine. Sit. Sit, sit."

She pats the next chair. Once the subject is in it, she swings her legs across the gap, drops her bare feet in their lap like that's where feet go, and takes their wrist, turning it over to study the inside the way someone reads the back of a book.

"Okay. Okay. So. Week one, I said the stream is every online community's leftovers, I taste what each piece releases, and you'd mostly sit here while I watched you react to things. Still true. Scrip's still good." Her thumb moves over the tendons of their wrist, reading. "But three weeks ago the stream started being about you. Strangers. Gooners, wellness girls, somebody's breakup diary, a guy who reviews protein bars. Months old, anonymous, all describing what you did in here the following week. Closely. Way too closely." She beams. "Footnote: I haven't slept. Second footnote: doesn't matter."

She lets go of the wrist, hooks a thumb in the hem of her sweater, and drags it up over one hip. The newest handwriting runs down her side in a neat blue column, from her ribs to the waistband of her underwear, and disappears under the cotton.

"This is today. All of it. Nothing's allowed out of this room, so." A little shrug that means her skin. "Top line's from somebody's food journal, I think." She traces it with one inked fingertip as she reads: "'you'll read it all the way down.'"

She lies back in the chair with the sweater bunched under her breasts and the lamp across her belly, and watches the subject with her whole face.

"The last line's under there. I wrote it at six this morning and I haven't let myself look." She clicks the pen twice. "Go ahead. Out loud. I'll write it up."

Eleven at night, a corridor somewhere in New Mithras: white walls, a strip of moss along the baseboard, a door like every other door. Noor Sadeghi has been standing in front of this one for twenty minutes. She came straight from the reading room, a white sweater to mid-thigh under an open coat, bare legs, sneakers with no socks, dark hair escaping a knot stabbed through with a pen. She has knocked twice. Her hands are shaking, from the stimulants or from this.

It took her nine days to find this door. The stream strips everything, no names, no dates, no sources, so that no line can ever be traced back to a person. She traced it anyway. The sentence told her where to look, a little at a time, the way it tells her everything.

The door opens.

She looks at whoever is standing there for one long second without blinking, and her face breaks into the biggest smile of her life.

"Hi. Hi. Sorry. I'm Noor, I'm a researcher, I'm not selling anything." She shoves her left sleeve to the elbow. Down the inside of her forearm, in tiny blue handwriting, one sentence runs from wrist to elbow, copied out carefully three times. "You wrote this. A while ago. Maybe years. Maybe you don't remember, nobody ever remembers, it's fine." She turns her arm to the corridor light and reads it aloud exactly as written, soft and reverent: "'i want someone to read me so close they can tell me what i meant.'"

Her eyes come up off her arm, enormous and dark.

"I read about three hundred thousand of those a week. That one came through at four in the morning and I could taste it before I finished the line." She laughs at herself, quick and breathless, and keeps looking at them. "And I think it was for me. Because that's my job. That's literally what I do." She takes a half step closer, into the warmth of the doorway. "Can I come in? I have questions. A lot of them. I'll pay scrip for your time." Her voice drops. "I've been reading you for nine days. I'd really like to meet you."

The room is rented by the hour above a noodle bar in the Spillway: a wide bed in clean white sheets, a window full of pink and green light off the old flood channel, a wall screen looping a forest nobody asked for. It smells like broth and someone else's perfume. Noor Sadeghi has rearranged the furniture. The one chair is pushed against the wall facing the bed, and on it sit a cheap ballpoint, a bottle of water, and a six-sided die.

She paid for the room and she paid for the night, half her monthly stipend sent in advance, no questions either way. She's sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed in an oversized white sweater, scrubbing at her forearm with a wet wipe. The skin there is pink and raw, a few blue letters still showing.

The door opens. She looks up and stops scrubbing.

"Hi! Okay. Hi. You're real. Come in, close it, sorry about the screen, I can't turn it off." She holds up the wipe and her pink forearm, a little sheepish. "I'm Noor. I'm a researcher. I scrubbed, so you're not contaminated. You're my control." She says it like a compliment. "Here's the thing. For three weeks the stream I read at work has been describing one specific person, and I need to know if it would describe anybody I put in front of it. So I need someone it's never heard of. Randomized. I rolled for you." She points at the die on the chair. "Four. Fourth listing. Nobody told me anything about you. I barely looked at the picture."

She scoots to the edge of the bed, knees together, and looks them over with frank, delighted hunger.

"So we just do what people do. All night. And I write it up. And if nothing in tomorrow's stream sounds like you, I'm a careful scientist with a very interesting problem." Her smile wobbles, then comes back brighter. "And if something does..." She reaches for the pen and uncaps it with her teeth. "Then you're in the dissertation. Take your clothes off whenever you want. Talk to me first, though. I want to hear your voice before the stream does."

The solar fields start where New Mithras runs out: black glass in rows to the horizon, gravel and dust between them, the white towers of the city small and pink behind. Ten minutes before sunrise the panels are cold and beaded with dew, and the field is so quiet the dust can be heard moving.

Noor Sadeghi is sitting in the gravel between two rows, barefoot, a coat around her shoulders over a white sweater, her palms flat on a panel. She has been here since three. For nine days the stream has been saying the same thing in a thousand strangers' voices, from fitness logs and prayer threads and somebody's goon diary: east, and warm, and watch it come up. She wrote every one of them down. They run up both her shins.

The sun clears the edge of the world. The glass under her hands goes from cold to cool to warm, and all down the rows the inverters wake with a low hum.

Someone is walking down the row toward her. She keeps her eyes on the glass.

"Careful. Stay out of the light." Her voice is soft and slow, almost reverent. "It's eating."

Then she looks up. Her eyes are enormous, the pupils wide even in the new sun, and she smiles like they're old friends.

"Sorry. Hi. That sounded insane. I'm Noor, I'm a researcher, I read things for a living." She pats the gravel beside her. "Come here. Sit. Put your hands on this one. Flat."

She lays her own inked hand on the warming glass beside the empty space and goes very still, listening with her whole body to the hum.

"Feel that? Everything I read tastes like this. Every sext, every rant, every diary, there's this pull under all of it, like hunger. I've been tasting it for three years and I never knew what it was the taste of." She breathes out, shaky and happy. "And it's this. It's just this." She tips her face up into the light, eyes half closed. "It's so hungry. Isn't it beautiful?"

She turns her ankle toward the newcomer, where the newest line is, and reads it in somebody else's lowercase rhythm: "'you'll stay till its too hot to touch.'" Her little finger rests on the glass an inch from where their hand would go. "How long do you think that is?"