“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.”
“The morning Fast Local didn’t just board passengers; it swallowed you whole; digested you in a belly of rusted steel, being pressed so tightly against the damp, salt-stained clothes of strangers that you could even feel the irregular beating of their hearts. For Ananya, the morning commute wasn’t a journey. It was a daily localised war.”
“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.”
“Yug left a life of cloistered academia to serve as a Safeguard, one of many that protect Now, the land between Before and After. While all seems well for Now, the Times, they are a-changing?”
“I saw a woman there earlier,” he says. “She looked like you, but her hair was long.”
“Not long after first using the serum, she began to hear voices in the walls. Without Leonard there to share the four-poster bed with her, or to ease her fears, she slept terribly and often woke in a cold sweat, convinced she had heard the voices screaming.”
But it was more than what it was then; it was perhaps the integral consequence of years of scurrying around, of making do with life with less than a whole of one’s heart, the calculus of one’s life upset by ever-widening circuits of concerns in which, repeatedly, one was entangled.
She had to get out of here. But there was nowhere to go. Only the sea, deep and brown and salty. There was also school, but that was its own kind of imprisonment. So she put away her plate and went back to her room. It was small, but it seemed expansive, because it was the only place that the baby hadn’t yet invaded. Starfished on the bed, Romi envisioned what her life would be like if she could just make it out, out of this little house, out of this tiny space, and out to the city above.