The Ones We're Meant to Find(81)

But then he says, “I know we weren’t close, despite the machinations of our moms.”

Moms? He doesn’t offer any other words, just his gaze. His unsmiling, dark gaze, something familiar about the shape of his eyes. Then I see it—and can’t stop seeing it even though it doesn’t make any sense. The resemblance to Ester Cole has to be a coincidence. Even when the boy introduces himself as Andre Cole, I’m thinking, Impossible. I must still be recovering from the neuron-damper.

“You died,” I say.

“I should have,” says the boy calmly. “But I sent a bot in my place. A prank, you could call it.” He comes around to the front of my chair. “So now you understand.” Pulls up a stool. “How I know what your sister’s been through.” He sits down, and faces me. “For her, live.”

The info is rapid-fire. Bots. Kay. A dead boy—Andre Cole—who understands her. My brain struggles to piece it all together, then gives up. It focuses on what really matters.

For her, live.

He makes it sound simple. It’s not. To start, it’s not exactly “living” if you’re unconscious in a pod, frozen for who knows how long, basically dead in any era previous to ours. Plus, Kay doesn’t even know. Doesn’t know I was sneaking out to swim in the sea because I didn’t want to worry her. Clearly that’s backfired. It’s my fault, and my fault only. Kay was always reminding me of the risks, and I didn’t listen to her. I chose to live the way I wanted to live. And now I alone should bear the consequences.

“Is there something so wrong about choosing a natural death?” I ask the boy. His eyes say yes. The option to freeze myself is there, so why not take it? It’s the rational choice, and it’s what Kay would tell me to do. “She’d convince me to change my mind,” I now say to the boy. “She’d even offer to pod herself with me.” And be twice as hurt if I stood by my choice, without knowing the truth: that I would pod myself in a heartbeat if I could wake up with Kay still beside me. But, as I explain to the boy, “She belongs here, in the now. If you care for her, you’d agree with me. So let me go out the way I want. It’s one of the few freedoms I have left.”

The boy—Andre—doesn’t reply. In silence, he stares at me, until I’m convinced he’s seen everything. How I shake at night. How I almost lost the courage, before coming here, to go through with this on my own. I want to tell Kay. Want her to tell me it’s okay, that the world will be still waiting for us—me and her—when we return eighty, a hundred, or a million years later.

I want to, but more than anything, I want her to make her choices independently of mine.

“Destroy it,” I say, nodding at the Intraface. “I’m not leaving until you do.”

Slowly, the boy stands. He retrieves a glass boxlike machine, and drops the Intraface into it. I’ve never used mine much, compared to other people, but there’s still something about seeing the kernel turn into a white powder that feels painful. All those memories, gone.

But Kay will always be with me, in my mind.

“Thank you,” I say to the boy when it’s done.

He nods once. Then, quietly: “I’m sorry.”

He says it so sincerely, like he’s personally sorry the ocean poisoned me, that I can’t help but laugh. And once I laugh, I suddenly feel lighter. “If you run into her,” I tell him, “remind her for me, will you? Tell her if there’s anyone who can move the world, it’s her.”

Then Celia rises out of the chair. Celia—not me. I’m still sitting as she stands, cleaving from me like an exorcised soul. I rise behind her, and watch as she walks, hair longer than mine, swishing with every stride out of the operating room, through the body shop. Even terminally ill, her brain jacked up on pills, she walks with a confidence that causes the conscious clientele to turn and look at her.

It’s the walk of someone who knows their place in the world.

And for once, she really does. I know, as Celia leaves GRAPHYC, that the last of her fear has vanished. This is her choice—to spend her final days under the open sky, breathing the air billions before her and billions after her will breathe, carried away by the amniotic blue. Living this lifetime to the fullest, even at the very end, in hopes Kay can live hers.



* * *



I sit in the tub until the water goes cold.

All this time, I thought it was about Kay. Her life versus mine. But now, with this final memory—one so clearly manufactured by my brain, nonexistent on Celia’s original Intraface—I realize Kay is not my choice.

I step out of the tub, and peer into the mirror upon the sink. I see her face. The girl I was built to look like. She stole my freedom of mind. I should hate her. But I can’t hate someone I understand. And I understand her, better than anyone. Better than even her sister.

I wish I could speak to her. I know she thinks she’s shallow, growing up with a mom like Genevie and a sibling like Kay, one a leader in the outside world, the other able to think up entire universes. Compared to them, Celia thinks of her seemingly outsized life as frivolous. I wish I could tell her she’s wrong. She’s brave. Strong. Her empathy is a well so deep it knows no bottom. Her grit is inexhaustible. Before I had a part of her name, I had her strength to crawl out of the water. I have her capacity for love, and I haven’t wasted it. I love U-me. I love Hubert. I love M.M. I’d love Hero too, given more time. I love the tang of sea wind on my face and the damp of the sand between my toes. I even love this island, believe it or not, and I love the idea someone else did too, a thousand years ago.