The Field - Part 16
Zin wasn’t aware of Richard’s decision to release BeeVision to the world.
She had convinced her friends—her chosen family—to meet her in Canada.
The water in the infinity pool shimmered like liquid mercury under the Canadian sky. Zin floated on her back, watching clouds form and dissolve through the lens of two tabs of LSD and the peculiar clarity that came from being exactly where she needed to be.
Five days into the retreat. Five days of stripping away the performance of Zin Williamson, Executive Placement Specialist. Power Broker. Person Who Made Things Happen.
Here, she was just Zin—foster kid, survivor, a woman who’d learned to read rooms because missing the signals used to mean not eating.
“You’re spiraling,” David said from the pool’s edge, his voice carrying that particular resonance that meant the mushrooms were hitting. “I can see it in your shoulders.”
“I’m floating.”
“You’re floating while spiraling. Very advanced technique.”
She laughed, the sound echoing off the mountains. David had always been able to read her better than anyone. Twenty-seven years of shared references, shared trauma, shared understanding that family was something you built from scraps and stubbornness.
“He’s going to take the deal,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know him.” She let her feet find the pool’s bottom, standing waist-deep in water that felt like silk. “Richard sees problems and solves them. It’s who he is. And Walsh presented him with a problem: someone’s going to weaponize this technology. Might as well be someone with ethics.”
“Faulty logic.”
“All logic’s faulty when you’re trying to control the future.”
Sarah emerged from the house, carrying tea that steamed with intention. She’d been microdosing all week, fine-tuning her consciousness like an instrument.
“Marcus is having a moment with the trees. Full conversation. Says they’re explaining fractals.”
“They usually do,” David said, accepting tea. “Remember when they taught you about grief?”
Sarah smiled softly. “Different trees. Same wisdom.”
Zin watched her chosen family arrange themselves around the pool. These people had held space for her becoming—who’d seen her at her smallest and still believed she could be enormous. The contrast with her Austin life felt sharp as mountain air.
“I think I lost him,” she said, surprising herself with the admission.
“Richard?” Sarah settled into a deck chair that cost more than most cars. “Or the version of Richard you thought you were building?”
“Fuck.” Zin dove under the water, letting the shock reset her nervous system. When she surfaced, both of them were watching her—concerned, amused, familiar.
“You want to talk about it?” David asked. “Or should we skip straight to the part where you realize you’re trying to control him like you control everyone else?”
“I don’t control people.”
“You optimize them,” Sarah said gently. “It’s your superpower. You see what someone could be, and you create conditions for them to become it. But Richard...”
“Richard was already becoming,” David finished. “You just made sure people noticed. And now you’re scared because he’s becoming something you didn’t predict.”
Zin pulled herself out of the pool, water streaming off her like liquid light. The air hit her skin and suddenly she could feel everything—every molecule, every possibility, every future branching out from this moment.
“He’s brilliant,” she said. “Not managed brilliant or performed brilliant. Actually brilliant. And I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Love him?” Sarah suggested.
“I do. Desperately. Inconveniently.” Zin wrapped herself in a towel that felt like clouds. “But what if loving him means letting him make the wrong choice?”
“Then you let him,” David said simply. “That’s what love is. Witnessing someone’s autonomy even when it terrifies you.”
Marcus wandered around the corner of the house, pupils wide, notebook in hand.
“The trees explained everything,” he announced. “Reality is just consensus hallucination, but the consensus is optional. Also, I think I invented a new form of mathematics.”
“Show me,” Sarah said, making room on her chair.
While Marcus explained his tree-derived theorems, Zin wandered to the edge of the deck where the view opened up—mountains, forest, and sky so vast it made Austin feel like a snow globe. She thought about Richard, probably hunched over his laptop, trying to spreadsheet his way through an impossible decision.
David joined her, tea still in hand.
“Want to know what I really think?”
“Always.”
“I think you’re scared because you finally found someone you can’t optimize. Someone who’s going to become what he’s going to become—regardless of your five-year plan.” He bumped her shoulder. “And I think that’s exactly what you need.”
“To be powerless?”
“To be surprised. To be partnered instead of in charge.” He let the words hang before adding, “You’ve been taking care of everyone since you were eight years old. Maybe it’s time to let someone take care of you.”
“Richard doesn’t take care of me.”
“No?”
She thought about it. The way he noticed when she was performing confidence versus when she felt it. How he’d learned to cook her favorite breakfast without being asked. The poetry he left on her pillow—not love poems, but observations about light and shadow that somehow said more than any declaration ever could.
“He sees me,” she admitted.
“Sounds like care to me.”
That night, after Marcus had filled seventeen pages with tree mathematics and Sarah had led a meditation that felt like dissolving, Zin found herself alone on the deck. The others had gone to bed, leaving her with stars that looked like punctuation in the sky.
Her phone sat on the table, turned off for five days. She knew there’d be messages—Richard, the company, investor noise, status updates. The old Zin would’ve already drafted seventeen contingency plans.
But the current Zin—the one with galaxy brain and pool water still in her hair—understood something else.
She picked up Marcus’s notebook, flipping past fractal equations to a blank page. By starlight and muscle memory, she began to write:
Richard—
By the time you read this, you’ll have made your decision—about the business, about the future of human perception. I know you’re expecting me to have opinions, strategies, five-point plans for managing the outcome.
I don’t.
What I have instead is this:
I trust you.
Not the managed version of you that I sometimes try to create, but the actual you.
The one who writes poetry about collarbones and builds hardware from wonder.
The one who saw lights in a field and decided to follow them.
If you take the deal, I’ll understand. The logic is sound—someone will weaponize wonder, might as well be someone wonderful.
If you don’t take it, I’ll understand that too.
The world needs more people who can’t be bought, even with the best intentions.
What I need you to know is: I’m not going anywhere.
Not because I’m managing outcomes or optimizing futures, but because I love you.
The actual you.
The one I can’t control.
Canada is showing me something I’d forgotten—that the most powerful thing isn’t knowing what comes next.
It’s being present for what’s happening now.
And right now, I’m sitting under stars that look like your consciousness research notes, feeling grateful that I get to love someone who builds bridges between the mystical and the measurable.
Whatever you decide, we’ll figure out what comes next. Together.
All my love (the unmanaged kind),
Zin
She photographed the letter with a vintage Polaroid, then lit the page on fire, watching the ashes gather in the grass.
For now, though, she let the mountain air carry away her need to control, to predict, to manage.
When she returned, Richard would choose a future.
But tonight, Zin floated in the space between knowing and unknowing, between control and surrender, between the woman she’d built herself to be and the one she was still becoming.
The stars offered no answers.
But they made beautiful questions.
And that felt like enough.