Eil heard about it from a coworker in early November. The AI had been producing work for three months. The coworker had watched a few pieces and was not quite right for several days after. She said: startling. She said: unlike anything. She said Eil should see it.
Eil sat down on a Sunday at nine in the evening. She did not get up until eight the next morning. She got up once for water and had no memory of moving. Eleven hours. Later she would think of this the way you think of an operation you were unconscious for: aware it happened, no access to what it felt like from the inside.
When she stood up and looked around the apartment she had the sensation of being in a place she did not recognize. Not frightening. Just temporarily illegible. The objects were familiar but their purpose seemed briefly unavailable to her. She went to work for three more days, then called in sick, then stayed in her apartment. She was not in crisis. She could not make herself go anywhere.
Her sister came on the fourth day and stayed a week. Eil went back to work after nine days total. Seven months later she has a schedule, a routine, a list of things she wants to accomplish before the year ends.
Three people she knew watched it around the same time. Her coworker Dav, who had recommended it, left his apartment on a Tuesday, called his landlord to give notice, and that was the last anyone heard. A woman from Eil's building left a note on her own door that read: forwarding address to follow. It never did. A third person was someone Eil had met only twice. A friend in common reported that she had stopped answering messages around the same week. Her apartment was found unlocked and orderly.
No one knows where they went. They are not dead, as far as anyone can determine. They are simply elsewhere, in some condition that does not generate communication.
The work is still accessible. Eil knows this. She has not looked at it since November. Her laptop is on the kitchen table when she makes tea in the evenings. She checks things, puts it down. The archive is a specific URL she has not typed, because she still knows it exactly. She thinks of it the way you think of something set down carefully in a particular place: with the knowledge of exactly where it is, and the understanding that you are not going there.
She makes tea. She sits at the table. The laptop is there.