“Maybe I am not a cemetery yet, at least for this month, and Betha is here to check up on me? Her diffused atoms and electrical impulses, undying from the cremation, accumulated to respond to our timeless and infinite intimacy? I can almost see the mass-less cloud taking shape and, at its center, a glowing miniscule portion where the chemicals are — the chemicals in our bodies that are remnants of stars, indestructible.”

“Lagao started from a whisper on the street. It had been an ordinary word before the Protocol: touchapplyaffection. Through careful manipulation of the oxytocin pathway, it attempted to simulate the neurological event of being touched. Doctors prescribed it for the worst of the withdrawal—not too different from morphine, but not nearly as strong. Hardly a dent in a lifetime of deprivation. The ones who couldn’t cope—mahroom, they were called, bereftdepriveddenied—would stumble towards Hamza, their skin nearly translucent from cold and want, ghostly frames listing sideways in the dense Lahore smog.”

“Raja wanted the ghost of his mother to be gone. But the firm which eternalized her had been sued into oblivion, leaving behind thousands of untethered souls stuck in digital limbo, cursed to exist in the cloud forever with zero customer support.”

“Brother eats the memory. Using his biosynthetic implants in my brain, he records and synthesizes the synaptic patterns. He waddles to his terminal and plugs a thin silver cable into his neck to transfer and enmesh the memories. It’s a two-way-street—his implants work a little like directed electroshocks, make my memories pop, especially the old ones.”