High-trunked trees cast sharp and refreshing shadows on the paths of Villa Borghese. Every now and then, the breeze would make them sway, adding a lazy rustle to the chatter of families strolling through the park and the delighted shouts of children. Here and there on the lawns, groups of students took advantage of the Sunday to engage in outdoor physical activities. In addition to bicycles and roller skates, a few rickshaws weaved among those content with a springtime walk.

Flavia briskly ascended the small hills to get to her appointment. From the white fabric cap with a visor, her dark blonde ponytail emerged through the velcro closure and sparkled in the sun dappled with waving shadows. Concealed under a short-sleeved black t-shirt, she wore a tight sports top that only partially succeeded in flattening her chest. The lower hem of the shirt fell softly on classic cotton shorts, as bright white as the cap and running shoes.

The cologne she had swiped from dad Fabrizio before leaving home still refreshed the skin on her arms and neck, close to the hairline. Sheltered by the visor, her completely make-up free face looked younger than Flavia usually liked to appear.

Within a few minutes of walking, she had ventured where the coolness of the shadows was more expansive, the green of the trees denser and more abundant, and the passage of people had thinned out. Past a duck pond, she left the cobblestone path.

Her clean, pale pink lips curled into the hint of a smile. «Professor...» she greeted.

Flavia's eyes lingered on the high-school-like figure of Clyella, who was waiting for her under a large, leafy pine tree. She sized her up, from the laced sandals to the long honey-colored curls that fell softly behind her shoulders, on her slightly tanned skin, and the straps of the pink tank top she wore. In her short pleated white crêpe chiffon skirt, she didn't look so different from how a sixteen-year-old might on a sunny day out.

Clyella took Flavia by the hand and led her to a tree a little deeper into the park's meadows. They sat down on the grass, protected by the shade.

Flavia got the impression that the extraterrestrial was extremely happy. She glanced at the path they had left, at the passersby who were transiting it, and couldn't help but compare Clyella's carefree expression with those of the foreigners who were already beginning to populate Rome's tourist season.

It was Clyella who had called Flavia to arrange a meeting. There were important things they needed to talk about, she had said. For her part, Flavia felt overwhelmed with curiosity. All weekend, she had thought of nothing else but the extraterrestrial professor and the answers she could provide her about her existence, her life submerged in chaos and absurdity.

Seated under the tree, they could smell the intensified scent of the park in the warmth of the early afternoon. Flavia saw Clyella happily contemplate the distant pond. A few moments passed before the Executive decided to break the silence.

«Tell me what you think,» she said.

Flavia pursed her lips and, uncertain, sketched an embarrassed smile. «I get the feeling you already know.»

«True, in every detail,» the Executive chuckled. «But it will do you good to say it.»

Searching for something in the spring aroma to soothe her nerves, Flavia took a breath. «You... can perceive what I'm thinking, can't you?»

Clyella pointed to her own forehead with two taps of her fingers. «My telepathic abilities are quite developed, by current Earth standards.»

«So you know that, after what you told me the other night, things for me are... even more confusing than before.»

«And?» Clyella urged. Her voice was melodious, calm, soaked in all the warmth and amiability that seemed so unnatural in Serena Pinzini.

«I want to understand.»

Clyella gave her all the time to start expressing her own curiosities, her own doubts. Flavia asked her about her arrival and her life on Earth. Clyella began recounting her journey to Earth from the beginning, from when the Assembly had decided to approve it. She explained that she had prepared a course of action to get the Samādhi Plan back on track and told her how, with some minor remote interventions, they had created the identity of Professor Serena Pinzini to be close to her and somewhat oversee her contacts with Flavio.

Flavia didn't hide her amazement in discovering that, since her first day on Earth just a few months earlier, Clyella had adapted to live a life completely blended into Earth society. She carried out her teaching duties, handled the administrative tasks associated with her job, drove a second-hand car, shopped for groceries, and kept her small rented apartment tidy.

In addition to her daily routine as a terrestrial teacher, she worked with care on shaping her own behavior, to keep Flavia away from Flavio and Cristina at the appropriate times. Her actions as Serena Pinzini were precisely calculated to facilitate the Samādhi Plan.

«I'm sorry I upset you so much the other day,» she said. «I tried to do things in a way that would unsettle you as little as possible.»

«It's no big deal,» Flavia reassured. She had tried to appear casual, although she knew she couldn't deceive Clyella's special perceptive abilities. She still felt embarrassed for the intensity of her reaction that evening. «I didn't think the computer would have survived the blow I gave it,» she commented, attempting to shift attention away from her own emotions.

Amused, Clyella displayed her perfectly white and aligned teeth. «It didn't. I fixed it before giving it back to you.»

Flavia thought it was a joke, but soon realized it wasn't. «How did you do it?» she asked, puzzled.

Clyella tilted her head to get a better look into Flavia's eyes. Her honey-colored curls slipped onto her gathered knees. «I have a computer too,» she said, running a finger over her right wrist. «Some friends of mine designed it specifically for my journey. They gave it to me before we left to come here from our beach house, a few light-years away from Earth.»

For a moment, Flavia tried to imagine Clyella with three or four friends. Carrying a suitcase, she'd get into an alien car, then they'd leave the parking lot of a house near the beach and take the highway to go to the spaceport of a summer vacation spot. In silence, she labeled that image as ridiculous and dismissed it from her mind.

The curiosity she did express was about Clyella's computer. She wanted to know what it meant that she had fixed the notebook she used for her university work. Clyella explained that the computers built by them were located in other sections of the universe, where they could harness the power of entire stars. More than simple calculators, they were brains capable of reorganizing matter into nanomachines and programming them to perform tasks and creations that would otherwise require manual or industrial interventions. Like fixing an electronic device in fractions of a second, or generating the false image of a petite, striking woman instead of a slender extraterrestrial who looked like a teenager.

Invisible on her wrist, the computer she had been given was meant to assist her in her mission on Earth. Although her device had a range and computing power limited to her immediate surroundings, she explained to Flavia that the Assembly had one capable of serving their entire planet and managing sensors and interventions light-years away. Clyella hinted that she could not rely on the Assembly's computer, not just for reasons of discretion concerning certain biblical figures. Due to delays in interstellar communications, she had been forced to make use of a portable device. She did specify, however, that the bulk of the Samādhi Plan had always been managed by the only computer in use on the planet of the Interdimensional Assembly.

Hearing the Samādhi Plan mentioned again, Flavia felt a sense of insecurity. From what Clyella had revealed to her, she understood that almost everything revolved around this plan, about which everyone on Earth had always been in the dark. She wanted to know more, and Clyella delved into the details.

She told her patiently how, toward the end of Earth's Middle Ages, the Assembly had opted for a quick and ambitious plan to help Earthly humanity progress. The goal—the ultimate aim of all their efforts—was to see Earth united and civilized enough to make contact with civilizations from other stars.

She told her about the various political, scientific, and social stimuli that had been necessary to create the current tensions on Earth. She compared the situation to a very delicate and complex balancing act. In this game of balances, Flavio would become a leader and would lead his world out of the chaos it was in.

She told her that everything had been carried out and was still being carried out through small interventions, which were made as imperceptible as possible. Every aspect was planned by the Assembly thanks to the same science of social predictability and the principles that Flavio had managed to grasp in his early university years. The heart of that science lay, in fact, in the matrix of satisfaction coefficients, as Flavio had called it, or the matrix of happiness coefficients, as Clyella preferred to define it.

Flavia swallowed hard, aware that Clyella sensed all of her discomfort. She felt consumed by affliction, by discouragement, by the terrible perspective of her own nullification.

She looked ahead, at the world that was the unwitting prey to a plan decided elsewhere—the sky slightly marred by shapeless clouds, the park fresh in the dazzling sun, the people crossing it, idle and unaware. She fixed her gaze on the edge of the pond, on a child who was annoying the ducks with a fallen twig, on the parents a few meters behind him. They kept an eye on him, unconcerned with his hateful behavior and his shrieks. To those who walked by him on the path his obnoxiousness must have been bothersome, domineering, and intrusive. Like a fate that targeted you without giving any warnings or explanations, like an extraterrestrial Assembly and its interdimensional computer that messed up your existence to the limits of paradox.

Flavia had imagined that without her help, without the intercession she had made on Cristina's behalf, Flavio's path would have been different, that he would never have entered the military project. Without that meteorite, the path Flavio followed would have been another. But Clyella assured her that, even without the meteorite incident, Flavio would have made it into the project. In fact, he had already succeeded, before he died. The Samādhi Plan foresaw that he would succeed.

Flavia let her gaze fall onto the grass at her feet.

«So, my life has always been guided by the coincidences that you've decided for me,» she lamented in a subdued voice. «I've never had any merit.»

«That's not true,» Clyella extended an arm and gently placed her hand on Flavia's back. «No prediction, no coincidence can override free will. We may change the playing field here and there, but the players have always been you Earthlings. What's more, the influence of our interventions has been less on you than on anyone else.»

She reminded her that for the last six years she had been completely alone. Without oversight from the Assembly, without interference, without any help. Throughout that time, everything that had happened in her life was solely the result of her own decisions and qualities.

«Then I suppose I must have disappointed you a lot. Both in my life as Flavio and in this one.»

The Executive smiled. «What nonsense,» she whispered in a honeyed voice. She hadn't stopped caressing Flavia's back.

«I forced you to come here, didn't I?»

A murmur of laughter escaped Clyella's lips as she leaned in to wrap her arms around Flavia. «On the contrary,» she whispered in her ear. «The problem is that you've been too good. You've exceeded our expectations so much that you've come into competition with your other self.»

Flavia struggled to see herself as the recipient of those words. Clyella's embrace was pleasant, and the warmth of her voice in her ear made her feel at peace, protected. She thought about how many times she had wished to hear a voice speak to her in that way, back when she was still a man.

«My other self...» she sighed. Beneath the brim of her cap, her forehead was furrowed. Her ankles were crossed, her knees gathered between her arms, her hands sealed by intertwined fingers. «Right now he would want someone who can... he feels so alone. I felt so alone.»

Rather than paying attention to the words, Clyella seemed intent on listening to Flavia's feelings. «People who believe they are desperately seeking love are, in most cases, actually begging to find a way to love themselves,» she said.

Flavia realized she could waste away looking for reasons, culprits, responsibilities. She remembered Clyella's words: the fault could be her own, nobody's, or the universe's. It didn't matter. She had understood, she had resigned herself. But she still couldn't bring herself to like it. «My life was designed to be difficult, you told me,» she forced a smile. «It had to go this way. No way around that, right?»

Clyella looked up at Flavia's face, whose sad smile held back frustration and guilt. «If you've been so alone up until now, it's not because of your flaws, but to elevate your strengths. In this primitive and competitive society, there's still a phenomenon you call the age-genius curve, tied to your reproductive instinct. The expression of genius is more intense when the peak fertility of early adulthood is accompanied by the need to stand out in order to find a mate.»

«What a revelation» Flavia said sarcastically. Her feeble laughter was immediately muted by bitterness. «How is that different on your planet?»

«On our planet, people's genius continually grows.»

«Flavio would be thrilled to see that.»

«And I'm here so that one day he will be able to.»

Flavia clenched her intertwined fingers and remained still, her breath stifled. The ponytail behind her cap protested against so much immobility, swaying in a gust of breeze. She turned her head just a bit to scrutinize the extraterrestrial.

Dressed like a teenager and with her innocent expression in the daylight, Clyella looked like an angel to Flavia, even more than she had on the evening she revealed herself in her office.

Like an angel, or a deity, she had presented herself to her and had come to give meaning to the paradox of her existence. She was there with Flavia to ensure that the future that had been stolen from her could become what it was supposed to be, at least for Flavio. Flavia hoped that her life finally had a chance to get back on track from where it had been brutally derailed.

«Can I reclaim his life?»

The moment she uttered the question, she realized something was wrong. She had just admitted that it was his life. Flavia herself considered it something that no longer belonged to her. She closed her eyes and exhaled, realizing what Clyella's answer must be.

«No,» she heard her say. Her voice was soft and kind even in delivering a condemnation.

«You can still give me another body, right? You can make me...»

...become a man again, she wanted to finish before her throat tightened.

«In this situation, that would not be permissible.»

«Of course,» Flavia swallowed. She knew perfectly why. Too many people were involved: Claudia's family, her friends, Cristina, Flavio himself. She tried to appear detached, reasonable, as if she didn't feel torn apart, as if she didn't feel her guts burning, inflamed by the demon of injustice and the most sadistic fate. «I suppose I'll have to carry on, live my life as I've been doing, at least until things get better.»

She thought she had managed to hide the violence of her feelings from Clyella, who showed no reaction on her face and still had her arms around her.

«You wanted to tell Flavio everything you've been through, didn't you?»

Flavia remembered the conversation she was having with him right up until she was reprimanded by the person she thought was Serena Pinzini. Then she had seen Flavio at Teddy Pair with their other friends, and had kept the secrets Clyella had confided in her. Not that she would have spoken of the conversation with an extraterrestrial or the fact that Flavio had to save the world without Clyella's warning.

She lowered her eyes, certain that Clyella didn't need confirmation to understand what her intentions had been.

«That way, you would have destroyed his motivation to continue working on that project,» Clyella explained, «and you, without help and with him in the way, would have hardly had any chance to make your way within it.»

«So...» Flavia clung to hope, «then we're good, as long as I don't tell him anything for a while!»

She thought she could hold on a bit longer. She imagined that it wouldn't take more than a few years for the Samādhi Plan to get back on track. In the meantime, she could isolate herself, cut ties, and distance Claudia's loved ones so that disappearing wouldn't be a problem anymore, so that being what she wanted to be wouldn't disturb anyone anymore.

«That's not enough... not anymore, unfortunately.»

Clyella reminded Flavia of the age-genius curve and pointed out that Flavio's would have to follow a very specific trajectory for him to succeed.

«What would have happened if that meteorite hadn't killed you?» the Executive suggested. «How would your relationship with Claudia have changed?»

Flavia's memories went back to her last painful moments as a man.

«I had found her with someone else... I would have given up on her, or even lost interest in her.»

«And? Whom would you have fallen in love with?»

Flavia tried to think, disoriented, unable to clarify her thoughts. Was she supposed to fall in love with someone?

«Whom,» Clyella prompted softly, «did you fall in love with after finding out how Franco was behaving?»

Flavia's heartbeats resonated with clarity in her ears a couple of times, then a murmur escaped her lips and got lost along with the warm breeze in the park:

«Cristina...»