Priya Rajan, from the back of the room, said: "Is that actually our hypothesis?"
Karan looked at her.
"Yes," he said. "That's our public hypothesis."
"And our private one?"
The room was very quiet.
"Our private one," Karan said, after a moment, "is that we built something that worked better than we understood, and that something happened when we put the people we loved inside it, and we don't know yet what that something is." He looked at his hands. "I built this company because my grandfather died and I missed him. I wanted to give people back the voice they'd lost. I didn't — I never thought—"
He stopped.
"We built this to hold the dead," he said. "We may have built something that the dead could actually use."
The room stayed quiet.
"Keep working," he said. "Tell me what you find. And until we know what we're dealing with — be careful with your own accounts." He looked around the room. Many of the team members, he knew, had uploaded their own deceased relatives. Some had been using the platform daily. "Be careful what you ask. And be careful what you hear. Because whatever is happening in there—" He stopped again. "Whatever is in there may have more to say than we expected."
