The Cloud That Was Only Mine

The exhibit was closing and nobody had told Maya's hands to stop.

She pressed her palm flat onto the scanner, which was warm from a whole day of other palms, and the screen threw up a fizzing cloud of dots. Green and gold and one stubborn purple. The dots swirled where her heat touched the glass, then settled.

"That's the last read of the day," said the technician, a woman with a lanyard and a coffee gone cold. Her name tag said Priya. She was already unplugging things. "It's not really reading you, you know. It's a demo. Preloaded samples."

Maya lifted her hand and looked at the smear of warmth fading off the glass. "Then how come it's different every time?"

Priya paused, one cable in her hand. "Different how?"

"I did it four times before you came over." Maya breathed on the scanner and watched the fog bloom and shrink. "The purple dot moved. It came back. The greens were the same shape but not the same place."

Priya set the cable down.

The room smelled like floor cleaner and old carpet and, underneath that, the faint sourness of a hundred people who had walked through since morning. Maya noticed she could smell it. She could always smell it, the way a room held onto the people who had passed through, the warm bread smell of some and the metal smell of others.

"Okay," Priya said. "So the demo scanner is fake. But the thing it's showing you is real. Those clouds are microbiomes. The bugs that live on you and in you. Bacteria, mostly. Trillions."

"On me right now?"

"On you right now. More of them than there are stars you'll ever see." Priya almost smiled. "They're on this glass. They're in the air you're breathing. You leave a cloud of them everywhere you go."

Maya went very quiet and pressed her thumb to the glass, then her whole hand, then the side of her fist. Each time the dots rearranged. Each time she felt the glass give back her own heat.

"If it was really reading me," Maya said slowly, "could it tell me apart from you?"

"That's the strange part." Priya leaned on the display case. "The real machines, the ones in labs. They can. Your microbiome is as unique as a fingerprint. More unique, honestly. Two strangers share more of their actual DNA than they share their bugs."

Maya turned this over. Her aunt was still in the meeting behind the glass door across the hall, gesturing at people. Maya had come out of the same family as her aunt. Same grandmother. Same last name that nobody could spell.

"So my aunt and me," Maya said. "Same blood. But not the same cloud."

"Not even close." Priya crouched to Maya's level, the way people did when they'd forgotten to be tired. "Here's the thing that gets me. Yours got mostly built before you can even remember. How you were born. What you ate when you were a baby. The dirt you crawled in. The dog you did or didn't have. The house. The town. All of it, in the first three years. It printed you."

"I don't remember any of that."

"No. That's my whole point." Priya's voice had lost its packing-up flatness. "You carry a record of a place you can't remember. A map of three-year-old you. And you'll carry pieces of it your whole life."

Maya breathed on the glass again. The fog came, and inside the fog she was suddenly not looking at dots. She was looking at a kitchen she had never seen with her grown-up eyes. A floor. Her own small hands on a floor. A window she couldn't place.

"The dog," Maya said.

"What dog?"

"We had a dog when I was little. My mom talks about it. I don't remember it at all." Maya's chest felt tight and enormous at the same time. "But it's still on me. The dog is still on me."

Priya was quiet.

"The house we moved out of. The town before this one. The bread my grandmother made that everybody says I loved." Maya was speaking faster now. "None of it's in my head. But it's all still here. In the cloud. Right now."

"Some of it," Priya said carefully, because she was the kind of person who wouldn't let a kid believe more than was true. "Not a photograph. It shifts. Every meal changes it a little. But the shape of it, the deep pattern, the part that makes you you and not anybody else on the planet. Yeah. That was set down back then. And it held."

Maya thought about every place she had ever walked leaving a smudge of her. The bus seat. The library table. This glass. A cloud of her drifting off her skin into the museum air, mixing with the clouds of strangers, and none of the clouds the same, not one, not out of all the billions of people, not ever in the whole history of people.

"So nobody's ever had my cloud before," she said. "And nobody ever will."

"Nobody. Ever." Priya stood up, and her knees cracked. "That one purple dot in the demo? Fake. But somewhere in the real you there's the actual version. Something rare. Something that only rode in on you."

Across the hall the meeting door opened and voices spilled out.

Maya didn't turn around. She leaned close to the scanner and breathed on it one more time, slow, and watched the fog spread out from her mouth in a shape that was leaving her body and would never be anyone else's.

The fog thinned at the edges and pulled back into nothing, and where it had been the glass held, for one second, the warm gray print of her breath.