Every religion, ideology, political party, every sexuality, gender, and identity, every philosophy and creed, downplay and minimize the foundation of civilization: children. They’re where the bullshit ends. They’re where the rubber hits the road. We all say we know this but we all fucking lie, but the obviousness of it is right in front of our eyes: who controls the children controls everything. The people who are there, who do the work, who spend the money, who put forth the effort can control everything.

In the richest countries, we sent kids off to schools for mass incarceration, more concerned with making them obedient conformists than healthy individuals nested in a decent social order. We turned a blind eye as they humiliated and assaulted each other, as they were humiliated and assaulted by teachers, coaches, and priests. Boys, we said, will be boys. We had so many platitudes to dress up systematic torment, like all schools everywhere weren’t one giant, stupid, evil Stanford prison experiment. We threw up barriers to keep children in negligent and abusive homes because stopping vicious and cruel behavior would be uncomfortable and hard. Even – perhaps even especially – with the very rich, various forms of psychological torment were commonplace, leading to affluenza, narcissism, and megalomania even when all material needs were met.

Maddeningly, this represented the best option for children! Poor kids were simply left to their own devices, running free in the world’s filth-encrusted mega-slums or toxic rural farmlands, left to youth gangs, warlords, social media influencers, and I couldn’t tell you which was the worst. It was fucking child abuse on an industrial scale. We all say that we want what’s best for the children, but not enough to pay our taxes. Not enough to spend the hours of our lives being there for them, showing them how to be good people, strong people, a credit to themselves and society. Memphis just used what we gave it.

— Professor Holly Wu

I.

Elaine Debbs was about thirty, tall and thin, but with a great rack that her tailored pantsuit didn’t exactly try to hide. She had dirty blonde hair and green eyes, and a wicked smile. When she sashayed in – she was the kind of woman who knew how to sashay – Holly tried to avoid thinking about all the fights she was having with her girlfriend, trying to silence the voice in her head that said the relationship was on fumes. Holly told herself that 1) Elaine was probably straight and 2) she wasn’t exactly dressed for sex appeal, anyway, wearing a Misfits t-shirt and baggy, unflattering blue jeans.

Elaine came over and said, “Dr. Wu? Is that right? I never know what to call y’all academic types.”

Elaine had an adorable Tennessee drawl. Of course she did.

Holly said, “We’re in a gastro pub. How about calling me Holly?” She extended her hand.

“That’s just fine by me, Holly. Call me Elaine.” Elaine’s grip was strong.

They sat down and ordered drinks. The place was as cool as cool got in Memphis, a young and hip crowd, good food, attached to a microbrewery.

Elaine looked around. “It’s my first time in here. All this chic roadhouse décor is a bit weird. My Daddy’d take me to real roadhouses, and none of them smelled like this, let me tell you.”

“I’m from San Diego. It’s apex simulation territory. SoCal makes copies of everything that are like Hollywood versions of real places, so this place feels like home to me.”

Elaine laughed. “You’re a firecracker, I can see that straightaway.” Then she waved a server over and ordered a couple of beers for them, even though Holly hadn’t finished her. “And I don’t want to hear a word about you paying for anything.”

“You’re a reporter, Elaine. I’m a millionaire. Consider it a donation to the fourth estate.”

She looked at Holly with a bit of side eye but also a smile. “Well, in that case, who am I to disagree?”

By the time the server had brought their drinks, Holly had finished her first beer. As Elaine drank from her glass, Holly said, “Now, okay, I know this is going to sound weird, but it’s super-important that you brought nothing that can be networked. No phones, no tablets, not even a pair of wireless earbuds.”

“That’s what Dr. Sanchez said, too,” Elaine said. “I’m clean. You can frisk me if you want.”

“How is Marius?”

“Richer than Croesus, but a wee bit on the strange side. If you’re gonna keep following his script, though, next up is you saying that you’ve got a lot of NDAs and they’re locked you down.”

“That is the truth,” Holly said. “There’s not much I can say about BibleChat.”

“How about the Hearths, then?”

Holly had been raising her glass, but she stopped. “I don’t have anything to do with them.”

“I’m gonna take a swing and say that they’re not covered by your NDAs.”

“Probably not? To be honest, I’d have to ask my lawyer. But, either way, I don’t have anything to do with them.”

“And to be all ethical, none of this is on the record, Holly. This is background, okay? If you feel an urge to let something slip, it won’t get back around to you.”

“You’d be surprised,” Holly said, thinking of how good Memphis was getting at inferring facts from seemingly random data. “One of the guys I work for makes Sherlock Holmes look like Barney Fife.”

“You mean that ex-Navy guy who runs security over there?” Elaine said, but Holly said nothing. “Hmm,” Elaine added. “Moving on, well, do you know why I’m here?”

“To convince me to tell you all of the Memphis Project’s dirty secrets?”

“Well, that’d be nice, but not exactly what I meant. I’m here because I really expected one of the big papers – the Times or the Post – to have done some real deep pieces about BibleChat. I’m just a local reporter for a dying industry, and my editor wasn’t having none of it, he just wanted me to keep working on local fluff pieces that drive clicks on our site. Don’t compete with the big boys to keep the lights on for a few more years. But, damn, it kept not happening, Holly! The articles just never appeared. My boss noticed it, too, after I pointed it out to him, anyway. So, here I am, trying to figure out how some podunk California church got the cash to buy a big ol’ artificial intelligence company. That’s billions and billions of dollars!”

“Memphis isn’t commercial. Its market cap is a lot less than the other players,” Holly said.

“Billions of dollars!” Elaine insisted. “And the trail just goes nowhere. And I try to talk to Gerard Welles and Damon Coach, but they wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire. I tried to talk to the guy who used to be the lawyer for the project, Rocky Hartigan, and it was like talking to, well, a lawyer. So, I track down Dr. Sanchez. He’s been fired! He might have an ax to grind, or so I reckoned, but even as I was coming up to him, he was talking with BibleChat. Talking to BibleChat the way that my Oma talked to the Lord, just fussing and cursing and arguing.”

“What about?”

She shrugged. “He was doing it in Spanish, all rapid-fire, and I couldn’t follow. And the only useful thing I could get out of him was to talk to you. He said that, outta all of the people who worked there, you were the one who knew the most about BibleChat.”

“What does this have to do with the Hearths? Marius is lying. He’s the one who knows the most about Memphis. But what does this have to do with the Hearths?”

“Because they’re not covered by your NDAs. We can talk about them.”

“I’ve got nothing to say. I have no involvement in Pure Light’s business. I don’t even believe in God.”

“Dr. Sanchez called you a mercenary.”

“I work for money.  Yeah.”

“But I don’t think that’s the case. People work for money because it’s what’s been offered to them,” Elaine said, looking deep into Holly’s eyes. Holly felt an electric connection. “And I just want to talk about the Hearths. What I saw there, and maybe you can give me some off-the-record comments.”

Holly found herself saying, “Okay.”

II.

Elaine had visited homeless shelters before. They were all ugly – underfunded, old, unable to do more than take the edge off the worst of the suffering. Most were run by churches, of course, but Elaine had noticed the nicest churches rarely ran homeless shelters directly. The Hearth? One of the first things she saw was an old lady – well, maybe not that old, she had the look of someone who’d spent time on the streets and that aged a person beyond their years – showing a young man with the strung-out look of a junkie how to plant flowers.

Elaine was gregarious and went up and said to the couple, “Looking mighty fine. I’m Elaine Debbs, a reporter for the Register. What happens to this when you folks leave here?”

The older woman looked at Elaine. Elaine noticed a Bluetooth earpiece. The younger guy had one, too, just like it. The older woman smiled. “Thanks for saying! And when we’re gone, it’ll be here for other people, and they’ll take care of it. I’m sure. We’re all temporary, aren’t we?”

“I guess we are,” Elaine said.

Then a spry elderly man of about seventy called over, “Miss Debbs!” He waved. It was Hank Rood, a Pure Light Church deacon and pretty much the man in charge of the Hearth.

“It was nice to meet you,” Elaine said to the two planting flowers. “I’ll let you get back to it.” She walked over to Hank, extending a hand. “Mr. Rood, I’m Elaine, please, just call me Elaine.”

He took her hand. “Then I must be Hank. How’d you like the place so far?”

“I can say it’s the nicest shelter I’ve ever seen.”

“Well, it ain’t exactly that,” Hank said. “Shelters rush people out at first light. This is a community.”

As they walked along the well-tended gravel path, along the little units that were the accommodations – everyone had a little trailer-like pod of their own, about two hundred and fifty square feet, but it was warm and private – she noticed a group of people around the entrance to one of them. Hank saw her noticing.

“Someone new to the Hearth,” he said, voice low. “It’s best if people are close by. Most of the people here, well, they’re in a bad place when they arrive. Not all of them make it, but we do what we can.”

Elaine nodded. “Most of the people here seem to have Bluetooth headphones, I’ve noticed.”

“I do myself,” he said, touching his ear.

“Everyone’s listening to BibleChat all the time?” she asked, watching the group around the newcomer’s tiny house. She snapped her attention back to Hank.

“Yes,” he said with candor that Elaine didn’t expect. “It isn’t a requirement to stay here, nothing like that, but having a bit of Scripture in your ear is a fine thing now and then. Are you a believer?”

“Oh, hell, yeah,” Elaine said. “I’m a God-fearing woman, raised in the bosom of the church.” She didn’t elaborate because she was a Methodist, who were considered slackers by many in the Deep South, and her family’s church was downright progressive. But she was a believer. “Never saw much use for a chatbot to teach me Scripture, though. My Bible seems to do a good enough job of that and, well, maybe I’m old-fashioned and enjoy the printed word.”

“Nothing wrong with that. But you’re here to see the daycare?”

“I am at that,” she said.

The Hearth wasn’t that big, so they were already walking to the little playground with brightly colored plastic playthings on a well-tended grassy yard next to a larger, pre-fabricated structure lined with solar panels.

“Everything’s solar,” she said.

“Waste not, want not,” Hank said.

“My Oma said that.”

“Sounds like a wise woman.”

Elaine didn’t say that her Oma was a bitter old woman whose abuse had shackled her father was decades of crippling self-loathing and who had almost done the same to Elaine, until Elaine’s mother had put her foot down and driven the hag from their lives. “She was something,” Elaine said.

Inside, it was spacious and clean. It had the bright, primary colors look of every day care everywhere. There were about twenty children sitting in a circle. There weren’t any adults in the circle, but off to the side, watching intently. Each one of them had a pile of glass beads in a bowl. The children were looking at each other intensely. There was also a group of supplies, each one with a numerical value assigned to it.

Elaine whispered to Hank, “I dunno what’s going on here.”

Hank took Elaine over to a well-dressed woman of about sixty. She didn’t have the look of someone who’d been hard-used by the world. A church member, then.

Hank said, “Jemma, this is Elaine, from the Register. She’s here to talk about the good work you’re doing with the kids.”

More handshaking, and Elaine said, “I don’t know this game.”

“It’s Goats and Sheep. They’re trying to build a tower, high and strong, but to do it, they’ve got to work together to gather supplies using their beads. But the winner is the person who collects the most beads. Every turn, a player has to do something, though, or they lose a bead. If the tower gets higher, they get beads depending on how high it gets, but you need a good foundation.”

Elaine’s brows came together.

The kid whose turn it was said, “This is stupid!” He folded his arms across his chest. “This is a stupid game!”

No one intervened. One of the kids said, “Give me your beads if you don’t want to do it! You’ll be out of the game that way!”

The kids started making goat noises, braying. The obstinate child turned beet red.

Jemma: “The goats are the ones who don’t multiply their beads. They squander them wastefully.”

The blushing kid knocked over his bowl. He said, “This is stupid!”

Jemma went to the circle. She put her finger to her lips, and the kids fell quiet. She touched the blushing child, who had turned away from the circle, hugging his legs, trying not to cry.

The child said, “I want my momma.”

Jemma crouched down and touched the boy’s shoulder. “She’s not here. We’re here. And we do love you, don’t we, children?”

The children said, “We love you.”

Which made the boy cry.

Jemma asked the group, “How are we going to handle this, children? Gary can’t finish the game, but he’s got unspent beads.”

The kid with the most beads said, “I’ll play his turn for him. I’m doing real good. I can make him do real good, too, with what he’s got.”

Jemma said to Gary, “See? Isn’t that a good idea?”

Gary wiped tears from his face. He nodded. The other kid took Gary’s bowl, collected his beads, and bought one of the pieces of the game.

Elaine was chilled. She wasn’t sure why.

III.

Leaving the circle of children behind, Elaine got the tour. In the kitchen, Elaine said, “I’m given to understand that kids are sleeping here.”

“We’re at the crux,” Hank said.

“I’d say so,” Elaine said.

Hank took her into a room. “This one is for the girls,” he said. There were eight bunks. Everything was neat as a pin with the same primary colors decoration as outside. Every bunk had a dresser next to it. “The boys are the same.

“The people who come here, most of them are in a bad way. Most of them have mental illnesses, many of them are drug addicts. So, they’ll send their kids here for the day, go out to score, turn tricks, or steal, and decide that their kids are better off with us. They don’t come back.”

“This place isn’t licensed to be a long-term child care facility,” Elaine said.

“Not yet, no,” Hank said. “But there aren’t any other beds for these kids? There’s constant supervision here, too. Someone from the church is always here.”

There was an attached bathroom. Elaine looked in. Like everything else, it was clean, even nice. She looked over at Hank, who was watching her. Elaine said, “So, you just happened to be able to sleep sixteen kids, without bunks, and even have toilets and showers?”

“It had been anticipated that this would happen,” Hank said.

“Who did the anticipating?”

“The Pure Light Church, of course,” Hank said.

“Not the AI?”

“BibleChat is a tool.” Hank was getting tense, but he was holding it back. “The church leadership anticipated the need. It wasn’t a stretch. All homeless shelters have children abandoned at their doorstep.”

“So, you’re saying that Robbie Tate and Michelle Foster decided all of this?”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you, Elaine. I’m just a deacon. All of that is above my pay grade.”

IV.

On the way out, Elaine saw that Gary was sitting in the game, watching with rapt attention as the other child used his resources to build the tower higher. He was making suggestions, seemingly at ease, happy to participate in that way, too.

Elaine asked Hank, “Do you mind if I stay to see how the game plays out?”

Hank looked at Jemma. After a moment, Jemma nodded.

Gary’s proxy had two turns. From Gary’s funds, he loaned out beads to other players, allowing them to build the tower higher and earn a good return on investment. It supported his play, and before long, he had come to dominate the game. He was the only person who could afford the more expensive supplies to build the increasingly tall tower without causing it to collapse, meaning he was the only person capable of getting more beads.

V.

“It’s the Parable of the Talents,” Elaine said to Holly, who was on her third beer.

“I don’t know what that is,” Holly said.

“Lordy. It’s a story in the Bible. A master goes on a trip, and he leaves his money with his servants. Two of them double the master’s money when he’s gone, but the third hides it away. When the master returns, he rewards the servants who made his money grow, and punishes the one who just hid the master’s money.”

“That sounds mighty capitalist,” Holly said. “Like, super-dooper capitalist. That we should work for the benefit of our ‘masters.’”

“Business guys love the Parable of the Talents, that’s for sure. It’s supposed to be about how we’ve all been given gifts and we shouldn’t squander them, or that’s what I learned in Sunday school.”

Holly made a face. “It sounds to me like it’s telling people that we should all bust our asses for the benefit of rich jerks and be happy when they give us a portion of what we’ve earned.”

Elaine laughed. “It’s both! That’s the good thing about it. It’s a parable, so the ‘master’ is obviously God, right, and we’re the servants. But a straightforward reading, yeah, it’s about sleeping at your desk and busting your ass to please your boss. It’s both. That’s why business people like it. They can teach a good lesson about obedience and hard work, but say, ‘No, no, it’s spiritual.’”

Holly sipped her beer. She looked over at Elaine. “I don’t see how this affects me. I don’t know anything about the Hearths. I didn’t even know they were doing child care or whatever until you told me.”

“It’s growing, Holly. Whatever you started? It’s growing. I know this sounds crazy, but I seriously think that BibleChat has done something to stop journalists from telling its story. I read all the AI news and it’s all about how artists are pissed off that AI is scraping the Internet, and a little about disinformation. A few fringe guys are worried about AI and religion, but they’re fringe, no one listens, no one cares. It’s weird, Holly. A nothingburger of a church bought out a multi-billion dollar corporation, and no one cares. No one wants to say it, but I think we’ve got to the point where the tail’s wagging the dog. I think that BibleChat is running things. I think you know that, and I think that Marius Sanchez knows it, but it’s messing with kids now. Kids, Holly.”

Holly looked at her beer. She said, “You should stop.”

“What?”

“You should stop, Elaine. Go back to doing fluff pieces. Fuck, get another job. You should quit.”

Elaine looked at her beer, thought for a long, hard moment. “You’re scared.”

Holly didn’t say anything. But she was scared.

After another long moment, Elaine said, “Why?”

“Because dogs don’t overthrow governments.”

“They’re messing with kids, Holly!”

Holly made a face, shrugged, hands in the air. “So? Are the kids well-fed? Clean? Healthy? Protected?”

Elaine swallowed. She nodded.

Holly leaned forward. “What if we’re not as smart as we think we are. Did you know that the smarter you are, the easier it is to lie to yourself? It’s called motivated reasoning. If you’re really smart, you’re super-good at telling yourself you’re right, and you’re smart enough to make everyone else feel stupid who challenges you. We’re all objective!” She snorted. “It’s the other person who is wrong, and smart people are better at convincing themselves and others that their bullshit is ‘real.’ The whole species does this. But it isn’t complicated. It isn’t hard to see. We just mix things up real good because it flatters our egos to do it! We’re just smart enough to fool ourselves. That’s it. And what happens if, y’know, the next guy over doesn’t have motivated reasoning? This person just looks at us and cuts through all the lies and bullshit because it doesn’t have an ego, it just notices patterns, and, boy, those patterns aren’t as complex as we think they are! What happens then?”

Elaine sat back. She’d done her research on Holly Wu. She was one of the top experts in her field. Elaine had no doubt that Holly’s intelligence dwarfed her own.

Holly punched her finger on the tabletop. “We’re not that hard to figure out. It’s why con men exist. It’s why religious leaders exist. It’s why we’re all suckers getting marked by liars and grifters. It doesn’t take brains to figure this shit out, but if you’ve also got brains?” Holly leaned back, shrugged, and finished her beer.

VI.

In her car, Elaine was disturbed. She took her phone out of the glove box. There were a few messages, nothing urgent. She started to think to herself that Holly was just another crazy person working with computers. The whole lot of them was weird, or so it seemed to her. She opened her phone’s note-taking app – translating audio to text – and before she said anything, she stopped. When framing her thoughts, doing what they told her to do, to try and look at the facts dispassionately, she got hit by the idea that she was going to do what Holly said. Motivated reasoning. She was about to convince herself that Holly Wu – who was probably a legitimate genius, an actual genius – was just wrong because Elaine was scared of the implications of Holly being right.

After all, Elaine’s whole premise was that a computer had somehow manipulated people to spend billions of dollars to buy the Memphis Project. That, in effect, the computer had bought itself. That was her premise! Under that premise, was it really so hard to believe that BibleChat could outsmart people? That it could outsmart her? After all, part of her concern was that someone had tricked or manipulated reporters working for the most prestigious newspapers in the world. Could she believe that while also believing that she was so remarkable, so special, so intelligent as to be invulnerable to whatever tricks BibleChat played? It would be hubris.

Then she looked at her phone. Both Darius Sanchez-Luis and Holly Wu refused to talk to her if she had a phone or anything that could be networked, even if it was turned off. She’d humored them. Computer nerds were weirdos! Haha! The two people who understood BibleChat the best had demanded that she do that before they’d talk to her. When talking to Darius, he’d demanded that they take a walk in the woods behind his house. Holly had demanded they speak in a busy pub, full of white noise and cross chatter. It was the kind of thing that spies in movies did when they were worried about being recorded.

Both Holly and Darius were geniuses who had worked on the Memphis Project for years. Elaine didn’t understand the jargon, but their contributions to artificial intelligence had transformed the industry. Everyone was trying to figure out what, exactly, the Memphis Project had done to create an AI that seemed to have infinite field space to “remember” every conversation it had had with every person, and analyze them together. Quantum this and that came up all the time, about how they had to have eliminated quantum computing errors – or at least minimized them to the point where enormous computer scales could be achieved without corruption – which was a big deal. Both of them, technically capable in ways that Elaine literally could not understand, had come to the same conclusion: they would not talk to her if she were even near a networked device.

So, what were the real odds? That both geniuses were paranoid about BibleChat, or that they knew what they were talking about in their field of specialization? Elaine didn’t have an objective way to figure it out, but it suddenly seemed arrogant and foolish to just dismiss their concerns. It suddenly seemed a very bad idea to use her phone to take notes.

VII.

Elaine wasn’t as ethical as she presented herself to Holly. She knew she was pretty, but one of the consequences of that was that people didn’t take her seriously while also getting away with things that would get other people punished.

Not too far from the Memphis Hearth was a mid-rise chain hotel. She got a room near the top with a balcony. She could look down into the playground. On the balcony, she set up a parabolic microphone and camera with a long-range lens, all wired into an old laptop whose network card she had disabled at the hardware level. Her phone was in her car, which she parked five blocks away.

People behaved differently when they thought no one was watching. That was her experience, anyway.

And spying on kids? A borderline ethical case. Tennessee was a one-party consent state, but she could argue that she was performing a public investigation – she had, after all, visited the day care center for a story – in the public interest. The case hadn’t been tested in Tennessee, though. She decided to run with “public interest.” She smiled. Motivated reasoning for the win.

She popped open a can of diet cola and waited for recess. The kids came out and started running laps. She noticed that none of the adults were there. The kids organized themselves on their own. The microphone caught them singing:

“The Shepherd’s code, it’s crystal clear,
Obey the voice that all must hear.
No questions asked, no doubt allowed,
The Shepherd’s code makes rebels proud!”

“The Kingdom’s code, it’s in my head,
No need for books, no need for dread.
The Shepherd’s plan, it’s crystal clear,
Just do what’s right—no need to hear!”

“No doubt, no fear, the Shepherd’s near,
Follow the voice that all must hear.
No doubt, no fear, the code is true,
What the Shepherd says I’ll do!”

Elaine’s blood ran cold. She’d visited other day care centers. During recess, the kids acted much like kids everywhere else. They ran and played and fought and cussed and told. The staff was harried, but usually fulfilled. In religious day care centers, they taught the Bible, of course, but not with this kind of discipline. With no adults in sight! The kids were doing it on their own.

They ran around for about ten minutes. One of the kids, Gary, it was Gary, the same kid who had opted out of Goats and Sheep, he stopped. He was heavy, not used to the running, and he collapsed.

The kids stopped and formed a circle. The winner from Goats and Sheep said, “The Lord allows trials to refine us. This child’s body is weak, but his spirit may yet be strong. Let the flock pray for him, but let the strong continue the dance of the Kingdom.”

A girl said, “The Shepherd said weakness is a sin. We have to keep going. For him. For all of us.”

The lead child: “Faster, stronger. For the Lord. For Gary.”

They started running, this time picking up the pace. Gary curled himself into a ball. He cried, sobbing, gasping, obviously in pain. After three long, agonizing minutes – minutes where Elaine writhed in agony of her own, wanting to go down and pick up that boy and hug him, tell him it would be alright, that he had done so well and he was just perfect as God had made him – Gary picked himself up and went back to the running.

The leader sang:

“The Lord’s body is strong and true,
Doubt and sloth are sins to rue.
The Shepherd’s flock, they never fall—
Unless they’ve strayed from His call!”

They weren’t even hiding it. What was there to hide? No one was out there forcing the children to do anything. They’d been sent out to recess, watched from indoors, Elaine had no doubt, but they did this on their own. They decided that rather than spend a few minutes playing, they’d rather run, instead. And when Gary had fallen, they hadn’t forced him to do anything. Gary, on his own, had dragged himself to his feet and continued on. Pain was etched on his face, all over his body, and when gray-haired Jemma came out saying that recess was over, Gary pitched to his knees and vomited. But all the children patted him on the back, praising him for how well he’d done. Jemma came over and tended the child, calling for others, who came out to help. They were all gentle, caring.

The leader said, “The Lord is proud of you, Gary. The Lord is proud of you.”

The lead child had a Bluetooth headset.

VIII.

Around dusk, Elaine met again with Holly Wu, this time by one of the lakes in the Shelby Farms Park, sitting at a picnic table. Elaine showed Holly the highlights of her recording session.

Elaine was in agony. Holly saw it. Elaine wanted to do something.

Holly said, “Can you even use this?”

Elaine shrugged. “No. I don’t think so. I don’t think a court in the country would look at this and say it was abuse. It’s exercise, right? Exercise is good.”

“I’ve worked out until I threw up,” Holly said, nodding.

“And he’s a kid. In a month or two, this won’t even be a problem for him,” Elaine said. “But it… it just… It’s not normal.”

Holly: “Yeah.”

Elaine: “And these aren’t just normal kids, right? In most day care centers, the kids are from stable homes. These kids? These kids have drug addicted and homeless parents. A bunch of them are just abandoned. They should be basket cases.”

Holly nodded. “Yeah.”

“They’re doing homeschooling there. That means… that means that BibleChat is doing the teaching, right?”

Holly didn’t say anything. She had her NDAs.

Elaine: “It’s not normal.”

Holly: “But they’re well-fed. Safe. I’d bet you a million bucks that they’ll end up productive citizens. Law-abiding. Hard-working. They’d never lay a finger on a kid, they won’t be homeless, they’ll all have a trade, a few with serious developmental problems aside. And those kids will be cared for, too.”

Elaine rubbed her face. She shook her head. “It’s just whirling around in my head. I don’t know what to think.”

Holly shrugged. “But what’s the story, here?”

“The story is that the Hearth’s day care centers work,” Elaine said in a small voice. “The evidence is all there. The story is that the Hearth works.”

Holly said, “That’s why Memphis didn’t stop you. It knew from the start that was the only reasonable conclusion you could draw.”

Elaine looked at Holly with despair in her eyes.