“I have found someone,” I say. “A mate. A human.”
Outside mates are forbidden in our culture, but I’m sure my family will make an exception.
My mother responds. “We know. He told us all about her.”
When I glance back at the beach, I expect to see Gerard sitting there, making peace with his last moments. Instead, he’s standing, facing a great void, a vacuum that is pulling around his body.
He gives us one last look of acceptance, a slight wave goodbye. “Tell my daughter I always loved her,” he says.
“I will,” I mutter.
Within a blink of an eye, he’s gone. The void swallows him whole, and a deep quake ricochets throughout the ground. Suddenly, the water starts to draw back. A massive tidal wave is forming behind us.
The stars above appear to be falling from the sky like marbles on a board. An eruption of earth, wind, fire, and everything in between.
“We have to go,” I growl.
But my father dismisses this plan. “No,” he says. “We have prepared for this. This is what needs to happen.”
The rumbling does not end. The wave reaches new heights, a tower of solid liquid, ready to break over our bodies.
This is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but I have to believe that love transcends wetware, software, and all the other man-made, mechanical bullshit that holds this place together. I have to believe that some things were meant to survive.
If what Ava and I had here was real, we will find each other again. That goes for my family too.
It is all a part of the plan.
Until then, I need to let go and have faith.
I need to believe in the only thing that is real: the destruction of my known habitat.
I close my eyes and let the sea break over my head.
I let it all go. One wave at a time.
A loud commotion, a cacophony of strange noises, algorithmic humming and beeping from unseen machines startles me awake.
I blink my eyes, but I can’t see a damn thing. Everything is shapeless and fuzzy, a broken signal.
I am not in my world anymore. I am… outside of it, completely.
“Christ, he’s awake,” someone says.
Another voice hisses. “Turn the server off, now! It’s going to overload the entire damn thing.”
I blink my eyes again, and small waveforms begin to appear, making up bodies of men and women in white lab coats. They’re glancing frantically at machines that seem to show my vitals.
I hear another voice, deep and unworried. “Do not shut him off,” the man says. “Let the servers die if you must. You’re not killing him.”
Killing me? What the fuck…
“But sir, the system is not stable. If we don’t shut him down, the entire thing will collapse,” a scientist says.
I blink again, and my vision becomes clearer. I breathe and taste their air, stale and unpleasant, so different from the oxygen I am used to inhaling.
Another blink, and I feel the urge to stand, but cables thread right through me, circulating deep into my muscles. When this understanding sinks in, I malfunction.
I start to convulse, body giving up on itself.