[[Any last questions or requests?]] Dio asked, in a tone that suggested te knew exactly what I wasn’t asking. Then te added a teasing note: [[Tips for how to manage your Cycog? A kiss for luck?]]
I did manage to laugh this time, a weary whir of sound, as if my chest had filled with clockwork. Dio was transparent in ter attempts to distract. "I could use a hug," I said, surprising myself.
[[The easiest of requests. Do you have any preferences?]]
I blinked, puzzled, then realised te was asking what I’d like to have hugging me, and I laughed again, a more genuine effort this time.
"Don’t you? Something that would pass as your Core Unit, if you were a Bio. While still being something I’d feasibly want to hug."
[[Interesting.]]
The starscape before me blurred, and then resolved into a sky, and me beneath it, standing in an empty vastness, mug, chair, Snug, all vanished. My eyes also no longer felt raw, my nose had unblocked, all trace of my crying fit erased. The shift made me dizzy, and glad that Dream Speed had not frequently moved us about without softening the transition.
There was an absence of Dio, though, unless te considered terself an empty space, or a starry sky. My sight blurred again, but then it became clear that the stars themselves were moving, drifting downward, forming into lines, streamers, vast tresses of nebula hair, and at its centre a humanoid figure, stepping into existence.
Te had chosen to be only a little taller than me, with skin of a faded dusky violet, ter features patrician and androgynous, lit by a suppressed laughter no doubt due to my gaping. But then te tilted ter head, and gave me a smile so full of warm sympathy that I was glad te immediately wrapped me in ter arms, because my face crumpled, and I wept all over again.
I am not by nature a hugger, and Dio was a mote, an alien, wearing a body purely by request. It made nothing better. I was glad I had asked.
My tears, at least, I could bring under control more quickly this time. Was I already growing used to the idea of the complete destruction of everything I knew? I resisted the temptation to wipe my face on the starry open robe Dio had conjured for terself, and just straightened, sniffed, and stepped back a little.
[[[[[[[I’m sorry I never had any intention of saving your planet, Taia.]]]]]]]
The voice was layer on layer, so much more than Dio’s. Because this was Ydionessel, fledging of Veronec.
"I’m sorry too," I said. "I wish it made more sense to be angry at you." I paused, surveying tem. "Your self-image smells like geranium. And has a lot more echoes."
Te laughed, and then spoke as a Bio would, still in a rich voice, but with no extra layers. "Yes, it’s an indicator of our own ranking system, though we usually only use it when we want to show off."
"Can I ask a—a minor boon?"
"Ask, certainly. There’s a great deal I cannot do for you."
"Let me remember. Whatever part of me that wakes up. Not to shout it to the world, just to go through the end understanding what’s happening."
"Wouldn’t that make it worse?"
"Knowing all the horror ahead for everyone who doesn’t die today? Maybe so, if I didn’t know that there’s an end to it."
Te tilted ter head, then gave me a single nod. "Very well. I think that I can trust you."
That was, in its way, a big compliment, and I smiled, felt tears threaten to return, and took a step back. Whatever I felt about personal alien overlords, I was glad this one had made a horrible end just a tiny bit easier to bear.
"Goodbye Ydionessel."
"Farewell."
If you wake without a soul, surely you should be able to tell the difference.
I had expected to be a remnant of myself, acquiring a zombie-like shuffle, a hollow gnawing at my insides, something . Instead, I was as refreshed as ever. My conversation with Dio was a tear-filled yesterday, and I felt fine.
What if none of it had been true? No end of the world, no time-travelling Cycogs, no galactic collective? Dream Speed revealed as a vast psychological experiment to discover how many people would join a Chocobo future.
That would be the best possible news.
But perhaps the transfer had failed? The lifeboat had left without me. I would die in the bombardment, or struggle through thirty years of disaster, only for the ships to come.
After staring at the ceiling for at least ten minutes, working through practical steps for facing a chain of disasters, I decided that maybe there was something wrong after all. I’m not an overly dramatic person, but nor am I so even-keeled as to picture the slow starvation of my parents without a little internal shrinking.
Standing was an experience. It wasn’t difficult, and my limbs had lost no energy, but they felt disconnected, as if the ground did not stay firm beneath my feet. A nebulous sense of time limits pushed me along. How long had Dio said we had? With the distortion of the game, I could have only minutes left. Whether I was a remnant, or the whole of me in a state of shock, procrastinating in my room did not seem to be the way to deal with it.
The scent of fresh coffee sent me searching for my parents. The living room was silent, the TV turned to an early morning weather report with the sound muted. Did my mother have work today? I checked their room, found no-one, and returned in confusion, only to spot them dozing on the couch.
"Morning," I said, and my voice sounded so odd I said it again with more strength. "Morning."
My mother shifted slightly, but didn’t wake. My father was very still. I put my hand on his shoulder. Warm.
Talking to Dio, I’d kept cringing away from the question of whether my parents would be candidates, but there was no reason not to think it. They hadn’t trained as devotedly as I had, but they’d still made it to space, and they met all Dio’s other admittedly vague criteria. No young children. Considerate. Probably able to recover from grief.
Because I’d been busy with the System Challenge, it was likely most candidates had accepted their offers long before I’d returned to my Snug. Were these remnants of my parents, shells running short of energy, dying before my eyes?
I decided not to know. Let them sleep. I could only hope they’d be able to stay together, whatever happened.
The weather report had been replaced by an image of Arlen, head thrown back, the whole of his body expressing song . Would Dio allow Imoenne and Arlen to travel as a pair, even though they weren’t a couple? Was Imoenne, so brilliant and so shy, what the Cycogs were looking for with their inoculation?
I considered the rest of my guild. Silent would surely be a candidate, and Nina Stella. Perhaps they’d meet again, in a distant future. And Far was a survivor—he’d not hesitate. What about TALiSON? Or Tornin and Amelia? Surely—but then there was Sprocket.
I found I could feel sad. It was a distant, scratchy sensation, but there. Sprocket’s real name was Dylan, and he hadn’t been quite twelve when I joined the guild, and he’d grown from a funny, eager kid to a brash, faux-confident…kid, and even if he’d been in a politer phase, he hadn’t been strong at the lan parts of the game
Not wanting to grade the survival chances of all the people I’d ever known, I buried myself in a coat and went outside to the pale pastels of an unseasonably cold dawn.
The road felt soap bubble light beneath my feet, and I thought not about my guild, but all the people who had never played Dream Speed . Those who would most appreciate the fantasy of benevolent support offered by The Synergis were least likely to have had a steady internet connection, a GDG cowl, or even somewhere safe to sleep. They would all die now, gamers and non-gamers, all but the tiny percentage who would survive the fall, and the infinitesimally smaller number who, unknowing, had played for their lives and won.
Читать дальше