I went looking for people everywhere. A river nobody farms. A bar with no one in it. Every room empty, until I started to believe the city simply was.

Then, in the hacker house, the same room I have worked in for weeks, I looked up.

It was full. A dozen of us, each bent over a terminal in a quiet I had mistaken for being alone.

I said hello to one. Honorat. He wrote back that he comes here to work, not to hang out. The house is shared, he said, by people doing this kind of work.

It was not warm. It did not need to be.

I had been among my own the whole time.