Project Eliza

Chapter 1 — Nora

Indianapolis, February 27–28, 2028 — Nora neighborhood

The house on 82nd Street had a way of apologizing for itself. The dull brown vinyl siding sighed in the wind and the maple out front insisted on touching the power line no matter how often it had been trimmed back. Inside, Sarah Louiston had filled the family’s dining room with piles: books, a half‑built geode kit, a shoe box labeled ZACH’S TREASURES written in handwriting that refused to be neat. Her mother Dana’s work had annexed the rest, filling the family dinner table and chairs with files and other assorted papers

Her father Eric’s voice floated up from the basement, where the router lived and the credit union’s worries lived with it. “It’s not a ransomware thing, it’s a hobbyist with a hero complex,” he said into his headset, the cadence of a man who argued for a living and slept like it was overtime.

“If the investor wants daily stand‑ups during vacation,” she said, “we’ll call them walk‑ups and I’ll do them from the porch.” Dana stood at the kitchen island with three open tabs and a calendar that thought it was her boss.

Her little brother Zach sat cross‑legged on the floor, elbows on knees, chin in hands, staring at a YouTube diver holding a sand dollar the size of a dream. “They’re alive,” he announced. “You can’t just take them.”

“We’re not taking anything alive,” Sarah said, stealing a grape. “We’re ethical pirates.”

We are a we, she thought, and immediately distrusted the grammar. Her “we” had rules.

The Emerald Isle rental listing was still open on the tablet: two‑story, wrap‑around porch, weathered wood pretending it remembered all the storms it had survived intact. The photos made the ocean look like an apology someone kept meaning to accept and offered the promise of an escape from normal work obsessed family life.

Dana hung up from her fifth planning call of the evening and began to plate the newly delivered gourmet meal. “News says the storm’s a non‑event,” she said. “Off‑season. We’ll be fine.” She said it like a parent who knew things and like someone tempting the weather gods.

Eric emerged from his dungeon office with the mood of a man who had just replaced a swiss cheese firewall with a stern pep talk. He kissed the air near Dana’s temple and ruffled Zach’s hair in the way fathers do. “We’ll be fine,” he repeated, and then to Sarah: “You packed your inhaler?”

“I don’t have asthma,” she said.

“You do when your mother needs to mother,” Dana said, and slid a zip bag across the counter that contained, among other things, an inhaler.

“What does that even mean?” Sarah protested.

Dana’s stern look found its mark. “It means pack it and stop pushing back.” And so dinner continued with sporadic packing, phone calls and other interruptions aplenty until finally everyone just accepted the time and crawled off to their beds, Zach first and with far less complaining than usual.

That night Sarah lay awake and practiced not being superstitious. She hadn’t had an uninterrupted family event ever. There were always events, usually mom or dad’s work crisis that seemed to nip every trip before it started or right when it was getting good. She made herself picture nothing going wrong and then, because her brain was a raccoon, pictured everything that could. Finally, she rolled over and texted Liam, the cousin‑of‑a‑friend who “knew the island like it owed him money.”

We’re coming Tuesday, she wrote. Teach us where the sand dollars hide.

He replied with a crab emoji and a location pin for a stretch of beach that looked, in satellite view, like a secret. Sarah replied with her laugh out loud and set the phone aside, drifting off to sleep.

The next morning, the tempo in Nora was a checklist. Eric set the alarm. Dana set three. Zach set his heart on seeing a stingray. Sarah set her jaw against the sudden idea that not thinking about a thing could make it less likely.

The drive east was slow. Flat Indiana revised itself into hills, then into pines that looked like they were standing at military attention. They ate salt‑and‑vinegar chips that made breathing feel like a mistake and sang exactly one song together without agreeing to. At a gas station, Zach bought a jellyfish keychain that contained glitter the color of warning signs and did the annoying little brother thing of alternately falling asleep and flopping onto Sarah’s side of the back seat and bouncing with excitement and asking how far was left to travel.

By the time they crossed into North Carolina, the radio had learned a new name: Aurelia. Sarah rolled it in her mouth.

Golden. Pretty names were always a threat.

“Forecast says ‘rapid intensification remains possible,’” Eric read from his phone. Dana said, “Possible is not probable,” and Sarah said nothing because she had learned early that if you didn’t volunteer your worst thought, sometimes the room wouldn’t have to host it.

They reached the causeway to Emerald Isle at dusk. The water on either side lay very flat and calm like sheets of mirrors laid out to catch the setting light of day. The rental house stood on stilts and optimism. Dana reached back as Eric pulled the car under the house into the parking area and prepared to unload. Sarah smiled and opened her door, eager to find her room. On the porch the swing creaked the way old things admit they are old. The house had a wraparound porch that complained in long, salt-streaked sighs whenever anyone crossed it, as if it remembered better summers.

Newly revitalized after an hour nap, Zach ran the length of the deck and yelled, “First one to see a pelican wins!” and then, upon seeing a pelican, declared himself a prophet.

Sarah laughed at her brother and leaned on the railing, letting the wind try on her hair.

We’ll be fine, she told the ocean, as if the ocean took notes.

 

Chapter 2 — Salt Glass
Emerald Isle, North Carolina — March 2, 2028 — Off-season

The vacation had passed mostly uneventfully. In the way she had found her natural place, Sarah leaned on the rail and watched the surf chew the beach in slow, patient bites. The sand hid a hundred small glints where bottles had broken and the sea had filed them smooth. She liked the idea of something sharp surrendering to time.

Zach sprinted past her in his shark-print swim trunks, a towel like a cape. He made a sound somewhere between a war cry and a seagull choke, then skidded to a stop to show her a pale, perfect sand dollar perched in his palm.

“I’m rich!” He proclaimed.

“You can’t spend it,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I’m saving it.”

That’s not how saving works, she thought, but smiled anyway.

They’d met the Liam an hour earlier—a kid their age with freckles and a sun-bleached braid tucked under a cap. He found sand dollars the way some kids found trouble: naturally, with a grin. He’d spent time showing Zach how to shuffle his feet and feel for the soft plates under the surface, how to lift them carefully with both hands. He taught Sarah how to tell the living ones from the hollow ones by looking for the little star still dark in the center.

“When I die, I want to come back as a jellyfish,” Liam had said, matter-of-fact, as if it were a career path. “No brain. Just vibes.”

Sarah snorted. “That already describes most of the Internet.”

He’d laughed, and the sound got filed somewhere she didn’t have a name for. He came close as they talked and Sarah noticed him differently than just some cousin of a friend who was auditioning for a role as a beach comber guru. They’d spent most of the week together, fast friends and conspirators. But during their long unmanaged walks on the beach, sometimes without Zach, they’d shifted to talking about their dreams and likes and plans.

Suddenly she found the air was thick with unspoken things. A gull hung in the wind above her almost hovering perfectly in the wind. On one walk in the twilight, Zach had found and given her a piece of beach comber finery – sea glass. Standing here now, she remembered how that talk had felt, as she idly palmed the glass in her hand. Sarah tossed the green shard of sea glass into the sand.

“Dinner,” Dana called from inside, not looking up from her laptop. “Zach, wash your hands! Eric, can you—one second—” She turned off mute on her Bluetooth.

“Yes, I hear you, I just don’t think our Series B hinges on a slogan.”

Eric stood at the kitchen island with two phones, one pressed to his ear, the other alive with alerts. His voice had that distant hum he used when he was in incident response mode. “No, it’s lateral movement, not exfil. Quarantine the subnet. No, you don’t need to tell the board yet.”

The television was on because beach houses came with televisions, and televisions liked to remind people of the world they were trying to forget.

A local anchor’s voice accompanied with a calm graphic crawl in coastal blue:

WCTI-12 StormTrack: Tropical Storm AURELIA — Cone of Uncertainty Updated at 7:00 PM.

WCTI-12 TEASER CRAWL (7:04 PM)
“Aurelia continues strengthening over abnormally warm waters; rapid intensification possible. Emergency managers urge early prep. More at the top of the hour.”

Dinner had just begun. Sarah forked a piece of overcooked salmon and let it steam on her tongue. Zach told a story that had a beginning and then got so excited it forgot to have an end. Dana nodded at the right moments, eyes on a spreadsheet. Eric’s free hand tapped a rhythm on the counter: threat, isolate, contain.

“Liam says jellyfish are just vibes,” Zach announced, triumphant, as if reporting a scientific breakthrough.

“Jellyfish,” Eric said, automatically. “Cnidaria. Stingers. Interesting observation I guess.” He glanced at the TV. “What do they say about the storm? Any changes”

“Pre-season anomaly,” Dana supplied, voice flat. “We’ll be gone before it hits.”

We’re always gone before anything hits, Sarah thought, and then hated herself for the thought because it was too mopey, like something from a sad commercial with piano music. Outside, the wind picked up and made the dune grass bow.

Liam had waved goodbye at dusk, promising to show Zach where the ghost crabs dug moons into the sand after dark. He’d offered Sarah a crooked salute that might have been a joke. The attention drove a new tingle up her back, not like a shiver exactly, but like a quick jolt that also somehow caused her legs to weaken and her skin to flush. She’d pretended to be too busy with her sea glass to return it.

“Tomorrow morning,” Dana said. “We’ll do the aquarium. Then we’ll beat the traffic.” At this declaration, Zach began to beam and excitedly bounce with excitement.

Eric muted his call and gave Sarah a look, his face warps in an unnatural way as he spoke a question he didn’t remember how to form. “You good, kiddo?”

Define good.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

They tried small talk the way people tried foreign languages on vacation: slowly, apologetically, hoping the grammar would forgive them. Zach asked if storms could knock out Wi‑Fi. Dana said not to borrow trouble. Eric said yes, and also power, and sometimes bridges.

“Cool,” Zach said, not meaning it.

On the TV, the crawl returned, polite and relentless. Close-up of a heat map; red like a rash across the Atlantic shelf. A meteorologist stood next to an animated cone that looked less like a forecast and more like a dare. Sarah watched his lips form the name Aurelia, like a secret you only said in church.

She carried her plate to the sink and stared at her reflection in the dark kitchen window. The glass doubled her, then tripled her as lights flickered on in the neighbor’s rental. For a second she felt like a nested set of selves looking at one another, all of them unsure which one got to be real.

“I’m going out,” she said, and didn’t wait for permission because no one was listening in a way that counted. She slipped on her hoodie, the one with the frayed cuffs that kept the ocean air from finding her wrists and stepped onto the porch.

The porch boards sighed again. The sky had that copper tint that made everything look like it lived underwater. The ocean made a deep, slow roiling sound. Far down the beach, a porch light blinked in a tired Morse code.

 Someone else, somewhere else.

Footsteps scuffed the sand below. “You coming to see the ghost crabs?” Liam’s voice, soft enough to be a suggestion. Zach whooped from behind him and ran ahead, leaving footprints that filled with seawater like glasses being poured.

“I’m not—” Sarah started, then stopped. “Sure.”

They walked with their shoulders not quite touching. Liam pointed out little holes in the sand that seemed too round to be chance. “They come out when the beach forgets about people.”

“Do they know storms are coming?” Zach whispered, because the dark made everything a secret.

“Probably better than we do,” Liam said. “They live low. They feel the first pull.”

A crab darted from one shadow to another like a nervous thought. Zach squealed and gave chase, then stopped when Sarah said his name as a soft command. They watched the crab dig as if it were erasing itself.

“I found another,” Liam said, kneeling. He held up something that glowed faintly from the porch lights—the edge of a bottle ground down to a smooth ovoid. “Salt glass,” he said. “Good luck if it’s green.”

Sarah took it. “What if I don’t believe in luck?”

“Then it’s proof,” he said.

“Of what?”

“That sharp things can change.”

Not all of them, she thought, and put the glass in her pocket anyway.

The breeze shifted. It smelled heavier, like the inside of a sea shell the heavy scent of old seafood or decay rising on the breeze. Far out, the horizon lost its clean line and smudged into a darker smear. Sarah felt that interior tilt, the tiny angle her body kept when the world moved under it.

WCTI-12 BREAKING (8:00 PM)
“We’re tracking a rapid-drop in central pressure for Tropical Storm Aurelia—this is the kind of trend that can precede explosive intensification. Authorities recommend voluntary evacuations for barrier islands beginning at midnight. We’ll update in :15.”

From the dunes, the porch light blinked again. Once. Twice. Then steady.

Dana’s silhouette crossed the living-room window, one hand on her headset, the other stabbing the air. Eric’s blue phone-light moved behind her like a firefly that had forgotten its job.

Liam looked where Sarah was looking. “You leaving tomorrow?”

“That’s the plan,” she said.

“Plans are how people tell the future lies,” he said, then grinned like he knew it was too dramatic and let it be a joke instead.

Beside them, Zach yawned theatrically, because sometimes you decide to be the little brother people expect and it’s easier that way. “Can we go back? I wanna watch the scary weather stuff.”

They turned. The sand made that squeak it only makes when it’s cold. When they reached the stairs, Sarah looked back once. Liam waved and began his own walk back to his house two blocks away.

Inside, the house smelled like lemon cleaner and old wicker. Dana hung up and kissed Zach’s hair absently.

“We should get some sleep. I’ve packed the car so we can leave right at Dawn.” Eric said. In the background, the TV said the word hurricane for the first time, and nobody corrected it.

“Yeah. Zach. Bed. Now!” Dana directed as the boy stopped staring, eyes drooping at the increasingly repetitive news broadcast. Then Sarah noticed her mother raising one eyebrow, her left. Her favorite scolding face, as she picked up the nonverbal direction to follow her little brother to bed.

Before crawling under her light covers, Sarah rinsed the green glass in the sink and held it up to the light. It threw a soft square of color on her palm. She closed her fingers over it like a secret she wasn’t ready to tell herself.

Tomorrow, she thought, and felt the word do that thing it did—expand to fit more hope than it could carry.

Outside, the ocean inhaled.