“One day we’re going to build something that destroys us all,” Kiran tells me while researching how to execute an experiment of hanging horses upside down, suspended in the air by their feet for easier transportation across the country.

“Will the horses be sedated?” I ask because the experiment sounds rather inhumane. Kiran claims past studies have shown that rhinos had higher blood oxygen levels after being suspended upside down. He ignores me.

“Oh, I made novel mush for lunch,” Kiran mentions. “Oat bran cooked in a can of tomatoes plus some egg.”

I pry open the fridge. There’s a bowl of stuff resembling crimson diarrhea sitting next to the egg carton.

“It looks awful but tastes pretty good,” he says. I push the bowl to the side and reach for the container of leftover rice.

“So what’s the motive behind transporting horses via helicopter?” I wonder. “Diversifying the horse gene pool between one cohort of middle school girls with CEO dads who’ve bought them private horseback riding lessons at their personal stable and another cohort of middle school girls who can only afford to lease a horse at the local barn?”

Because Kiran thinks humanity might accidentally nuke itself into the cosmos, he’s trying to do his part by making “realistic research advancements.” In other words: experimental procedures with no underlying math that requires a geometry of data representations trained under certain loss functions, or a theoretical machine learning Ph.D. student as slave labor.

“You never know when transporting a horse might come in handy,” he says.

“Like when self-driving cars go rogue and we have to fall back to natural intelligence?”

“Yes, exactly.”

I crouch to microwave the rice. Our microwave is below the counter rather than above which makes it easy to clean but a pain to fit things in. My sister thinks it’s crazy that we eat separately because not enjoying meals together would be a deal-breaker in her relationship. Kiran and I both view food as gasoline to refuel our bodies although I care slightly more about taste even though he’s been considerate enough to cook enough for both of us these days. We’re heading to the hospital to get my mammogram done because Kiran found out it has been five years since my last one. The radiologist at the time called me back about examining an abnormality in my left breast, but I ignored her calls. I told myself it was because I was afraid of a cancer diagnosis.

In truth, it was because Kiran was deep into his Ph.D. research and had a paper due in a month, and then a conference in Russia the next month, and another paper the following month, and I had been in between jobs because I no longer wanted to work on software that helped people manage their investment portfolios and thus kept the world mostly the same place. Five years ago, I still believed I existed for a specific purpose. Kiran claimed I had never grown out of middle school. And then I’d discovered the existence of the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that only accepted donations from recipients of the Nobel Prize, and decided if humans could already be preselected genetically to such an extent, I doubted my personal destiny warranted much attention from higher beings if they existed.

Before I started my new freelance gig building an app to organize shifts more easily at a soup kitchen, I visited my friend Naho in Japan, leaving Kiran at home with his computer. We’d played tennis together in summer camp years ago while she stayed with a host family, but she returned to Japan to study hotel management at Tokyo University. While I was there, I enjoyed watching the rush hour at Shinjuku station, people filling the station in uniform lines, clamoring onto the train when the doors opened like orderly sardines packing themselves into a can. I later dropped into a maid cafe in Akihabara to taste the famous hello kitty-decorated omurice, and on the way out, one of the visiting businessmen attempted to grope my crotch and plant a kiss, so I tried to wriggle my way out. I hadn’t realized how hard it was to fight against someone’s grip, especially after deluding yourself into thinking you’re invincible when seated alone watching the city zip past.

“Everything happens for a reason with you,” Kiran always said with an eye roll whenever I told him to calm down about lab failures. I figured I’d get the same response and refrained from telling him about Japan. Or about the mammogram. By the time I checked my voicemail messages, they had already been auto-deleted thanks to my phone’s pathetic storage capacity. And truth be told, I thought if breast cells had the potential to escalate to terminal illness, then I might as well let them do as they please—one less distraction for Kiran, one less destiny for me to overthink.

It took Kiran five years to realize I haven’t had another mammogram or general physical exam. Towards the tail end of the fifth year, he had started researching an XGBoost-based algorithm for breast cancer classification and discovered diagnosis takes around two weeks. He asked whether I had gotten a test done because he wanted to know if I’d ever encountered deep learning in practice. I told him no, and even if I had, I suspected pathologists would still run their manual diagnoses if anything were found. “But what’s the whole point if you don’t even get tested?” Kiran had asked. Shortly after, he stopped his research and decided his time was better spent on analyzing things like the transportation of horses hung by their hooves and the obesity of a country’s politicians as an indicator of corruption.

“Ready to go?” I ask Kiran, placing my bowl in the sink. Kiran’s mush looks less appetizing, but it might taste better than my bowl of plain rice and a boiled egg. Tomatoes have the umami and acidity to balance out almost anything else. They work especially well with eggs, although I don’t like how Kiran doesn’t seem to know how to use fresh tomatoes. He complains it’s too much work to boil them and peel off their skins even when I tell him I can eat the skin, fiber is good for you.

Kiran nods. We hop into his car instead of mine which he thinks is a wreck. He says my car’s headlights are too dim at night although I think this is an excuse to total it. I hardly drive so I’m not convinced a new car is in our best financial interest. Kiran likes expensive cars, but not self-driving ones. He picked up his car obsession after transitioning from his “humanity destroying” research to his “civilization advancement slowdown” research. Now, when I’m not hearing about the effectiveness of roller coasters hastening the passage of kidney stones, or Voodoo dolls seeking revenge on abusive ex-es, I’m hearing about brands of cars I don’t recognize but apparently cost a fortune. He wants one of those.

“Music?” I ask. We normally use his playlist because he prefers instrumentals and finds the vocals in my favorite songs too adrenaline-inducing for driving.

“Do the auto mix. The fifth one. Not the one with Taylor Swift on the cover. The one with the big deer in front of a tree. Or maybe it was a cityscape. You should see it.”

Turns out Kiran’s memory is more spot-on than I’d expected. The deer stands in front of both a city and a tree, as well as a rainbow and several floating umbrellas and the back of a lady in a bunny costume not unlike the playboy outfits I’d once seen while looking up women’s rights activists. I hit play as Kiran makes the turn onto the highway. There’s a closer hospital but Kiran doesn’t trust it. He only trusts university-affiliated hospitals because apparently all the money and smart people are there. I’m not sure I need any Nobel Prize winners to help me take a basic mammogram though, but if it eases his mind and only charges the insurance company, I refrain from arguing. There’s a light thrumming of a guitar. An ocarina joins in several seconds later, and I can’t help but think they’re an incongruous pair—earthy and bright and metallic sounds melded into one. A very Kiran-like music choice. He hums and bobs his head lightly as he breaks at a stoplight. I stare at his profile and then at my hands: the ring too loose for my ring finger so I wear it on my middle finger, the scar I got from chopping an onion too quickly, the red barrel bracelet I’m not allowed to take off for a year since it’s the year of the ox and therefore I always need red on me for good luck. Kiran’s immediate family doesn’t have any strict traditions, although he claims they did pumas for his 16th or 18th birthday—he doesn’t remember exactly.

“They’re so awkward because a priest is just chanting and you’re sitting there on the floor and then you’re supposed to do things sometimes like go pass a candle around,” he gripes.

We drive past a silver car with a huge siren-like sensor on its roof and two rectangular pieces protruding from the side of its hood—one of the autonomous cars Kiran hates even though, a few years ago, he worked briefly on a predictive traffic control system to more closely mimic the real world in vehicle simulations. It was probably the lowest of his lows when he’d go days without saying more than “can you get the mail?” or make grunts of acknowledgement before retreating to his makeshift office, a corner of the master bedroom carved out with a room divider. I’d leave him meals on the ground outside of the bedroom and sleep on the couch when his meetings with the teams in China went late. When I was off work, I spent most of my time with a chat group of random people interested in similar light novels and RuneScape. They had been trying to convince me to send a few photos of myself because I was the only one who didn’t turn on my video cam when we played. I finally sent a photo taken at the beach where I’d been wearing my favorite crimson off-the-shoulder dress with a flowy chiffon skirt, elegant if the wind blew the right way and a huge hassle if not. They reacted with “lols” and Pepe emotes I didn’t recognize, asking if I had anything to hide since I was wearing black spandex shorts underneath. I tried to delete the photo from Discord later, but even though it was gone from the server, they had already downloaded and reposted it. I set myself to inactive and passively scrolled the comments on the couch, waiting to either fall asleep with my head on the cushion or return to the bedroom if Kiran finished his meeting early.

“Didn’t know they were already out on the road,” I comment. I’m impressed but I don’t admit it because Kiran will be pissed if I praise “destructive” tech.

“Ehhh, no. These are the easy roads. Trust me, once they get into the crowded places, they’ll be getting honked at and crashing into ducks and things.”

“Oh no, not the ducks.”

“Yup, the ducks and their trail of ducklings.”

“Fuck that.”

I fall asleep shortly after, lulled from watching cars trail behind us and Kiran’s smooth driving. Kiran is a good driver—an actually good driver, which is something you don’t recognize until you’ve experienced both the good and bad. Dad failed his driver’s test seven times before getting his license, a feat I’m still shocked he managed to accomplish. He stops and starts abruptly and when we’re on road trips, he likes to wave his hand and point to interesting things out the window, like a group of deer or a Taiwanese beef noodle soup restaurant, and will start to veer off the road while trying to get us all to see. Mom has to scream for him to correct the steering wheel. Multiple times when I was a child, he nearly crashed into bridge walls and the only reason I’m alive is that Mom stayed awake the whole drive, on edge. Mom is also a horrible driver and hates the highways, so she relies on Dad despite his questionable skills. She tells me wives should rely on their spouses for driving and not to be worried if I eventually forget how to smoothly switch lanes. “He needs responsibility to establish a sense of purpose, otherwise he might just vanish one day. Men have it easy; they can always find a younger woman,” she lectured after I told her about Kiran’s work schedule and how I cooked all his meals for him. “You need to be independent but also make it seem like you can’t live without him.” Mom expects me to remember how to set up a modem and add pressure to my tires and switch out the water filter while also being a damsel in distress. I don’t think I can do both.

During those years, when Kiran worked well past midnight, I had plenty of time to learn how to fix the router, troubleshoot the gas stove when it failed to ignite, find the perfect amount of turmeric to avoid overpowering curry, drive on the highway for sporadic trips to San Francisco where I’d order a set of Shao Mai from Good Luck Dim Sum and eat in my car parked on the sloped side of the road. If I felt like it and the car had enough gas, I’d drive even farther. My car looked like an ant compared to the SUVs and heavy electric vehicles. When the sky fogged up and felt depressing enough, I contemplated the physics of crashing my car or getting crashed—the probability of getting pulverized due to the difference in mass.

Kiran nudges my shoulder when we arrive. I wipe drool from the corner of my mouth.

Kiran thinks my mammogram five years ago turned out clean. But even if I had told him the results, he’d deem any suspicious findings normal—probably just cysts or dense tissue or an unclear image. “There are too many false positives in this field,” he told me early in his breast cancer classification phase. “It’s too easy to confuse pectoral muscle density with breast fatty tissue and tumor region densities. The technology to remove these artifacts just isn’t there.”

The room smells like chlorhexidine. This used to be my favorite smell on Mom. She’d return home and bring in a gust of the hospital. I admired how her work seemed to infuse itself into her essence, how she brought back a different world to me. Mom said the scent penetrated you so deeply you become part of the process of healing. I watch people in blue scrubs walk by, glass and fog-tinted windows casting a backdrop behind the lobby desk, making the room feel both confined and endless. I feel like an imposter, a vessel harboring problems like gold, in need of healing listed out in rows on an insurance statement.

The technician leads me to a room where I can change into a gown.

“The compression might be a little uncomfortable, but it’s important,” the technician says. “We need the tissue to spread and flatten so we can have a clear view and minimize the radiation required to make the image.”

The lab technician places one breast at a time on the flat surface and a compression paddle lowers to flatten out my flesh. I feel like a microbe squished between a slide and sitting under the lens of a microscope.

“It gets easier with age, as breasts get less dense,” the technician says. I realize I’ve been grimacing, although I don’t know why. It doesn’t hurt, and even if it did, I think I deal with pain pretty well. I’ve hiked for hours with blisters blooming on my feet without complaint. Kiran says that’s not dealing with pain well and I need to stop this whole “eating bitterness” even though it seemed to have worked well for my parents who slept three hours a day when they first had me and were navigating their part-time jobs at the Golden Dragon Chinese Buffet while studying for their qualifiers. The technician is efficient and finishes within thirty minutes. I am happy to pull a shirt back over me.

Kiran is sitting by the toy train station where a few kids are playing. He looks expectant.

“Aren’t we going back?” I ask.

“How was it?”

“Normal.”

“Was there anything wrong?”

I’m annoyed. “You know they don’t have results until some time later. A radiologist has to take a look.”

“I don’t like it when you speak to me like I’m stupid.” Kiran has never been afraid of bringing up his complaints. I prefer to stay quiet and let things blow over. Plus, I’m sure he’d rather contemplate upside-down horses and blood oxygen levels.

“So, you’re just not going to say anything?” He continues.

“Results should come in under thirty days,” I reply, crossing my arms, waiting for him to stand and head to the parking lot. I wonder if Kiran considers mammograms humanity-saving technology, and if so, why he didn’t continue developing his XGBoost-based algorithm from within his cordoned-off cave in our bedroom, clacking against the keyboard and cursing MATLAB’s CPU usage while I headed out on my sporadic evening drives, wondering if highways ever come to an end. That would’ve saved so many lives too, far more than just mine.

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Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech.

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