S?O PAULO — 1:11 AM

  VILA MADALENA, S?O PAULO — PRIVATE ROOFTOP PARTY 1:11 AM

  Río Vásquez had been performing his current identity for sixty years and was, by any observable metric, extremely good at it.

  The performance was this: a man in his mid-thirties — permanently, convincingly — who worked in the intersections of human and supernatural community diplomacy across South America, was charming at a level that registered as a weather phenomenon in enclosed spaces, and had a personal history that began, to all documentary purposes, in 1963 S?o Paulo with an entirely credible paper trail that he had constructed with meticulous care.

  The performance did not include: river. The Amazon tributary he had come from. The community who had known what he was and named him in their own register. The specific quality of the longing he fed on, which was not random but deliberate — the longing of people who wanted to be something other than they were — and which he recognised because he had been feeding on the mirror of his own condition for sixty years.

  He stood on the rooftop and looked at S?o Paulo and the notification arrived.

  ENTITY DETECTED: ENCANTADO — RIO NEGRO TRIBUTARY.

  COMMUNITY RECORD: EXTANT. POPULATION: 847.

  NOTE: THEY RETAINED YOUR NAME IN ORAL TRADITION.

  NOTE: THEY BELIEVED YOU WOULD RETURN.

  THE SYSTEM INCLUDES THIS BECAUSE IT IS TRUE.

  RECOMMENDED CLASS: TIDAL PERSUASION [BRONZE TIER]

  CURRENT OPERATIONAL CAPACITY: 11.3%

  NOTE: THE SYSTEM CANNOT BE CHARMED.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  THE SYSTEM HAS ASSESSED THE PERFORMANCE.

  THE PERFORMANCE IS NOT THE CLASS.

  THE RIVER IS THE CLASS.

  CLASS CONSTRAINT: LOCKED — PENDING GENUINE CONNECTION.

  ACCEPT / CHALLENGE (72-HOUR WINDOW)

  11.3%.

  Sixty years of professional excellence. Eleven point three percent.

  He accepted the Class because the alternative was arguing with the first entity that had ever managed to read him accurately. He accepted it the way you accepted a diagnosis that named something you had already known was wrong but had decided not to look at directly. With the specific relief of the thing finally being said.

  Then he stood on the rooftop and felt the 11.3% like a river running at a tenth of its natural volume and thought: this is what sixty years of the wrong choice looks like, measured.

  The woman who was not what she appeared to be had been moving toward him for six minutes. He had been watching her approach with professional interest — the Bahian cadence in her Portuguese, the specific quality of her attention. Good. Deliberate.

  She stopped three metres away and said: "You turned before I finished approaching."

  "Most people don't notice me before I notice them," she said. Not a complaint. An observation.

  "I'm running 11.3% operational capacity," he said. "At 100% I would have known you were coming before you left your apartment."

  She looked at him with the expression of someone encountering another person who had also, apparently, received a significant and inconvenient notification. "I got told I have forty-seven contacts and zero genuine friends."

  "The System tracks the difference?"

  "Apparently."

  "That's," said Río, "either impressive or invasive."

  "Both," she said. "Definitely both."

  He looked at her. At the Bahian underneath the S?o Paulo surface. At the forty-seven contacts and zero friends.

  "Camila," she said, apparently reading his assessment and deciding to short-circuit it. "Camila Souza Ferreira."

  He considered telling her the performance name. Then he considered what 11.3% meant.

  He said his river name. The one the community of 847 had kept for sixty years.

  Her face changed. "That's a river name."

  "How do you —"

  "I'm from Bahia," she said. "In Bahia, we know what river names sound like."

  The 11.3% shifted. Fractionally. He felt it — the river at a tenth of its volume, and a single lock on the constraint gate releasing.

  They stood on the rooftop while S?o Paulo became a different city around them and neither of them said anything else for a long time, which was its own kind of performance, except it wasn't.

  ?