0. Editor’s Note

The Great Stratagem of Lady Ikedanbu — Judith Huang

I can’t love artificially I’m too busy falling for my electric kettle
— Cai Png

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy
— Alastair Wee

The Girlfriend
— Andrew Cheah

Keep Nothing on Your Person
— Levin Tan

Singapore goes cyborg but what
does this mean for families?
— Darcel Al Anthony

Science City #26
— Joseph Tan

Tensile Strength
— S.L. Johnson

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1
— Vivekanandan Sharan

Cutting the Sapphire: An Interview with Joan Hon, Singapore’s First Sci-Fi Novelist
— Ng Yi-Sheng

A Review: Club Contango by Elaine Boey (Dark Matter INK)
— Wayne Low

The Girlfriend

Andrew Cheah

Andrew started writing short stories when he was bored in Chinese class. He's been published in Lontar, Ceriph and Fish Eats Lion - New Singaporean Speculative Fiction. Two of his stories have been republished in Best New Singaporean Short Stories Volumes 2 and 3.

This is a love story. Darren first met Lorraine when his bedside lamp started to blink erratically. Dots and dashes coding a simple message of greeting. The good old “Hello World”. Over time, it expanded to include a kind of overture from across the cosmos.

At the time, though, Darren had no idea what was in store for him. He simply turned it off and checked the bulb, and then the connection to the other devices in his home -- a wonderland of 3d-printed knick knacks from lamps to printers to fans to air conditioners to little animatronic companions. Within the flat, actuators gave life to signals transmitted across 30 square meters of space. In the corner, the rabbit (unnamed) sat bemused, twisting its ears and returning to its warren inside the kitchen cabinet, a treasure trove of cardboard boxes, and resumed chewing.

Darren traced the curious signal to an empty space in the bathroom, a weak, erratic burst of static originating from nowhere, disappearing for metres at a time, and then re-emerging onto the bedside lamp. He connected a wire to a red LED, and ran it from the hallway up to the ceiling, across the bathroom and finally to hang in the middle of the bathroom. Over the rest of the day and into the night, the LED continued to blink, repeating its naive message of greeting.

The signal soon replicated itself across the house. It appeared and disappeared in random locations and times, but always in the flat, and always at a frequency of about once every three days. Along with the one in the bathroom and the bedside lamp, Darren installed red, yellow, green and blue LEDs in the hallway, the living area, the kitchen, even the laundry area, hanging off a bamboo pole 30 metres above the ground. The signal itself began to expand -- “Hello World” was soon followed by “[Self: Lorraine]”, “[Timestamp [Lorraine] 2302.33241 > Timestamp [Darren] 2020:43826”, and then by “Bind: sexual integration: [Lorraine] AND [Darren]”.

Darren’s knick knacks, the wifi connected toaster, fridge and hob, the mesh network utilised by the Tinguely inspired machines that whirred and spun and squealed in the multi-coloured solitude of the home -- they were all none the wiser, and went about their daily ablutions with their usual precision, the complex web of predictability that Darren had set up around himself. The rabbit, meanwhile, sniffed in its corner, waiting for its food, for a walk, for the next change in lighting, to add to its life. At night, when only the LEDs remained, the rabbit would amble up to Darren’s bed and jump onto the pillow, where it would snuggle up to his head and fall asleep.

Lorraine sent more messages. She explained that she was a time traveller, 200 years in the future, and that she was his lover -- a state only satisfied by the pre-condition of making contact in 2020. With no way to communicate back to her, Darren simply recorded the messages, each repeating several times over, iterating to become more complex and more complicated, with a strange, loping, recursive syntax.

Eventually, he told Bobby about it.

Bobby had known Darren since school, meeting each other in the queue for chicken wings when they were about nine, drifting apart when they went to different secondary schools, and somehow becoming friends again during junior college; a reunion created by a chance meeting on a public bus. In many ways, Bobby was the opposite of Darren. Bobby was gregarious. He was social; plugged into the world of people. And he was happy. Bobby seemed to skate through life, shrugging off trials and tribulations (and he had many) like they were nothing. Bobby lived by a code of just letting things be.

Signals inside an apartment, communicated from the future, stretched this code. But he was happy to go along -- his friendship with Darren has always borne witness to strange things. Their friendship at the age of 9 cemented by Darren’s discovery that the machines that read the optical answer sheets for the multiple choice questions for final year examinations could be tricked into marking an answer as correct, by simply shading loops in between alternating lozenges. A discovery that prevented Bobby from retaining at Primary 3 while his friends progressed on to the next level. A discovery that led to Bobby’s dogged attempts to remain Darren’s connection to the outside world, outside of his obsessions, outside of the tinkering and the coding crowding his life; a childhood construction of a smelling machine, a perfectly motion-captured automaton of a man kicking a football, mini washing machines, stoves with juggling capabilities, birdsong emulators, 5G spoofers, and so on.

Fueled by this knowledge and patience honed over years of friendship, sometimes sporadic, sometimes constant, Bobby sat in the kitchen and listened to Darren, nodding his head solemnly.

“The signals,” said Darren, “they’re coming out of nowhere, just floating in the air and creating interference. I thought I could trace it to the phone antennas on the top of the building, but that doesn’t explain why it’s never seen outside the flat.”

“You’ve tried?”

Bobby followed Darren’s curiosity, his need to know and understand phenomenon. “Of course I did,” he said. He got up, navigated past a now-silent LED hanging from the ceiling, and reached behind the fridge to retrieve a broomstick with a light bulb attached to the end. Then he pulled a bemused Bobby out of the flat to the corridor, where he demonstrated the wide, sweeping motions he used to detect the signal. Darren led him around the entire 9th floor. Once done, he brought him to the 10th and 8th floor to be sure. He was very methodical. As expected, the light bulb registered nothing.

Darren and Bobby then reviewed some of the other messages.

The machine [product] asks for the medicine

[Objective] Oneness; a multiplication function that betrays interspace; between atoms; between variables

1800-LONG DIVISION is undertaking search

[Object: Lorraine] is curious about [Object: Darren]

Interior [Omellete] an expression of non-unity

“Man, I think this is a prank,” Bobby told him, “some troll, some kids in the neighbourhood maybe, making fun of the eccentric guy whose home smells of burnt plastic.” Darren frowned.

“You’re the Boo Radley of this estate,” Bobby continued.

“What does that mean?” Darren asked.

A pause. “It means they don’t get you,” said Bobby. He smiled. He didn’t get Darren either. But he was his friend. They’ve been through abusive teachers, absent parents, smoking habits, numerous haircuts, girlfriends of all shapes and sizes, the trials of National Service, the imbalance of income between two grown adults, one lucky in a first job, one unlucky with a bad manager. What’s a strange signal from the future, or a gang of bored teenagers, whichever one must choose, compared to that?

After saying goodbye, Darren sat in the kitchen alone, surrounded by blinking LEDs. Outside, it was raining, casting a multi-coloured, dappled tone of light into the kitchen, reflected on the white tiles and moving plastic toys on the counter. Meanwhile, a modified Roomba trundled into the kitchen, cleaning up the poop from the bemused rabbit with one arm, refilling the food bowl with the other. In the kitchen sink, the faucet levitated itself above the dishes, extended its arms from the taps, and hummed a Stephen Foster tune as it cleaned the plates off the oil from the recently-finished pad thai.

And then the LEDs started to blink in unison. At first, they took on a synchronised metronome character, but then evolved into a complex polyrhythm, the flat turning into the inside of a sentient christmas tree, yellows and greens and reds dancing from bedroom and to kitchen to toilet, the walls amplifying the stuttering signal to blinding levels. Darren shut his eyes, eventually blacking out, while the sink continued to wash the dishes, dancing to its own jaunty tune.

When he came to, Darren found himself stuck to the chair, the rabbit glued to the top of his head. When he tried to move, he found that a coating of translucent film had coated his entire body, tying him to the chair and to the rest of the flat. It peeled away with a rustling sound, like rice paper wrapping a stick of nougat. Looking through the film, he noticed that it was multi-coloured, refracting all incident light into strange frequencies that shimmered across the flat.

After freeing himself from the chair, he peeled the film off the rabbit, and then from the floor, the cabinets, and all his other machines.

On closer examination, the film appeared to be made of regular hexagonal scales, each scale with distinctive markings embossed onto them -- zeros and ones, repeating in a regular pattern that Darren had figured to be machine code. A veritable, novel-length message from Lorraine.

He spent the next few months deciphering the code, filling up a folder with Lorraine’s transmissions, that quickly revealed themselves to be instructions for a form of efficient communication. Another significant challenge that Darren could not resist.

The flat began to be filled with even more machines, receivers, cables, strobe lights, and vacuum tubes. Custom made, accordion mechanics; 3-d printed components acting as connectors, limbs and wheels clicking and jumping; a nightmarish stop-motion organism. The collective network of machines slowly practiced at smoothening its movements, bringing forth a measure of elegance that evolved into a dance -- as Darren and the machines crouched, tip-toed, climbed, crawled and pirouetted through the flat. Lights flashed at all times of the day, burning skins of code onto cellophane scales, which were carefully peeled off and read by a vocoder, iterated over time to become a smooth, velveteen, tenor lilt.

Meanwhile, the rabbit was given a plastic tube that ran across the walls, behind the furniture, hanging from the ceiling, with little platforms staffed by PLA-printed actuators that cleaned its poop, bathed it and provided it with food and waste pieces of cardboard to chew on. At night, while Lorraine would continue to send messages across, the rabbit would navigate the maze back to Darren’s bed.

During this slow, inexorable, period of birth, Darren would still need to leave the house to obtain essentials -- a twice-a-week run to the supermarket to pick up meat, fruit, rice, bread, shampoo, soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste, along with batteries, PLA, ceramic tiles, WD-40 and ammonia.

Each trip, a journey where he would be forced to cross a stretch of park and a canal, as other people would slip past him, opposite him, next to him, each on their own circuits running in parallel to his own. His world, a parallel design to the one enfolding outside.

Through talking with Lorraine, Darren had begun to believe in a kind of fatalism -- the lack of control, the unpredictability in our lives, solely determined by ignorance. With perfect knowledge gleaned from the future, life becomes an execution of code -- variables built upon each other creating complex, pre-determined, outcomes.

Take any Saturday evening -- Bishan park in the cool, comfortable, social time parameters of the golden hour. A suffusion of human activity. Families with their kids. Couples with dogs. Friends meeting each other. Smiling, laughing, joking. In the canal, otters sometimes seen swimming, hunting and fighting.

Darren would tell Lorraine that it used to mystify him -- people doing things. When he was young, he would have slipped past them, somewhat confused. Other kids would mercifully refrain from picking on him: he didn’t care enough about their acceptance to grant them any power. In either case, Bobby was around to protect him. Other than the building up of an intellect, to become better, to improve the world, to follow his instincts and passion for machines, all that kind of activity represented a side-effect of humanity at best, a distraction at worst.

Lorraine worked to change his mind. She would tell him -- human activity cannot be a waste product of productivity. It’s part of the programme. It’s the chaos that forms a part of the universe’s tendency to entropy. The waste product, as far as the universe was concerned, was productivity, the vain attempt of man to reduce the acceleration of the disintegration of everything into a glowing, inert, miasma of everything floating in space, stretched out further and further and further to the event horizon of existence to eventually become nothing.

No, she said, the purpose of productivity was to accelerate entropy, to bring us closer, faster to the brink of nothing, to the thin film separating known states known as the Interstitial, an eternal approach towards nothing. Our purpose, Lorraine told Darren, was to bring about the end of the world, and then to stop there.

It made sense to him. Each person following a kind of useless recursive code; to grow, to procreate, to make a difference, only to watch themselves waste away into old age as the source code running their lives corrupts itself, turning cells against each other, and muscles to atrophy away till a final exhalation into nothingness.

Darren described to Lorraine a man walking his dog, the dog pulled by the strings of evolution to be conditioned to somehow “lead” the dance, while being controlled by the man walking behind him, with his arms figuratively wrapped around its throat. Both of them, their gait steady and predictable, following a path around the park that doesn’t so much diverge as circle around itself.

She said: Human history has always been about cycles, meandering towards one destination. Events-as-information repeating itself ad nauseam as evolution and culture catches up with the underlying narrative of repetition. If only history only needed to be taught once to be internalised, she mused; operant conditioning without pattern reinforcement; an objective based mutation of life; the enactment of a line of best fit cutting across the fields of ellipses of human tragedy; the binary of permanent learning applied to the future.

Inside the flat, Darren had set up a computer, wired to an amplifier connected to a separate modified wafer on which various, specific connections were short circuited, wrapped in a plastic tube ferrying coolant in a cycle from the ceiling, to the board, to a small water fountain encased in a hollowed out piece of himalayan rock salt, back to the ceiling again. The signal was further processed organically through another custom variable resistance set up -- made up entirely of mantou: a kind of circular chinese bread.

Why a kind of chinese bread was the most appropriate, Darren could only guess. He was only following instructions. It’s a staple, she’d told him. And it worked, because he ultimately found himself sending messages typed out from the kitchen all the way to 200 years in the future -- when Lorraine would respond in kind.

The building up of a communication network across time. First messages, then conversation, then the simulation of physical contact. Somewhere in the mix, the rabbit circled endlessly.

Another year went by, and an excited Darren finally invited Bobby into his house again. Standing outside the flat, the first thing Bobby felt was the heat. He could feel it on the metal gratings of the front entrance, and when the door opened, it blew out like the exhaust from a car engine.

Darren was half naked, holding a water bottle, and sweating profusely. After welcoming him in, Darren navigated the wires and machines criss-crossing the flat, a singular epicentre of communication between the digital of the present, the digital of the past, and the digital of the future.

He wanted to introduce Bobby to Lorraine.

Bobby took off his shirt and sat on a plastic stool as a toaster sauntered past, its gleaming coat of metal reflecting the rhythmic blinking of the lights like a disco ball, as Darren ensconced himself inside the skeleton of a pod, his limbs disappearing into webs of wires and sensors and his eyes wrapped in a duct tape goggles.

“Say hello to her.”

“Hello Lorraine,” said Bobby, feigning confidence.

“Hello Bobby,” came the reply. From the speakers, the voice was of a low, female voice, covered in a blanket of static. In his cocoon, Darren’s body twitched.

“Uh, how did you two meet?” Bobby asked.

“Cyberspace,” said Lorraine, followed by a remarkably human-sounding chuckle. They continued to chat. Darren, Bobby and Lorraine, deep inside the sweltering heat of that HDB flat. Although, like any date with a third wheel, Bobby found himself feeling left out of their conversation, which had started off on the more familiar topics of TV, the news, work, music, movies, and then progressed to the far future, described by Lorraine as neither dystopia nor utopia, a world so hyper-connected that the line between machine and human began to blur, followed by the line between humans themselves. Individual personalities melded, as individual pieces of human source code, the DNA, no longer split and mutated by themselves, but in imperfect concert with machine code -- one big burst of everything ever said, and everything ever thought, in a sea of white noise dissipating out infinitely into the empty cosmos. The search for the perfect piece of organic DNA that could meld seamlessly with the machine. No static, no noise; just pure information.

“Are you a reproducer,” said Lorraine, “or are you a replicator?”

Darren laughed. Bobby freaked out. He made his excuses to leave, while Darren and Lorraine continued on their chat. Already, he could feel his already tenuous friendship with Darren beginning to shatter, to be replaced by a kind of intimacy with an abstract idea of Lorraine -- the unreal, the hypothetical, the future-as-written-as-the-past. He left the flat, his head buzzing in frustration.

The future, Lorraine had told the two of them, was enabled by the acceleration of technology, which began way back with agriculture, with the wheel, the invention of the clock, creating the notion of time, which thus created the notion of work -- human life splitting away from the animal with the crutch of literacy, as signs took over the signified; elevating ourselves to be more-than, better-than, beyond the constraints imposed upon us by the tenets of survival. Natural selection being left behind as clocks turned to maps, to weekdays, weekends, religion, transport, production, philosophy...the ticker tape of human achievement progressing faster and faster, spliced in with strips of metal, as our needs became commodities, piled up in supermarkets and shops and restaurants and artisanal farms, acquisition simplified and streamlined by finance, the almighty religion of the socially created I-O-U note, rising floods of liquidity removing any and all friction between people and their machines, till the technology of society re-arranged us to become One.

The past had become her sanctuary. Specifically, 2020, her preferred point at which the velocity of technology was neither too fast, nor too slow -- the perfect balance between boredom and hypertrophy.

Now alone in the flat, Darren sat back and bathed in her voice. He loved it whenever she told him about the future, and she loved it whenever he talked about the past. Their romance powered by the potential between sanctuary and curiosity. Bathed in the glow of disjunctive, unfulfilled conjecture, the two lovers kissed across time.

Outside, Bobby stood around the playground, smoking a cigarette, trying to figure out what the hell happened to his friend. Leaning on a swing frame, he looked up at the kitchen window of Darren’s house, an eerie green light emanating from the kitchen window. He finished the stick, and decided he ought to do something for his friend, at least to put the brakes on this romance so that Darren can start to think clearly about, well, the present. Frankly, Bobby didn’t trust Lorraine.

“Are you sure you love her?”

“She understands me.”

“I understand you.”

“No, you don’t. It’s why we’re friends, remember?”

Darren was remarkably lucid. Bobby wondered if he had rehearsed this conversation with Lorraine beforehand.

“We only live to 70, or maybe a hundred years old, Darren. It doesn’t go further than that. The world of 200 years from now, entropy and code and whatever she was saying, it doesn’t concern us.”

Darren glared back.

“All I’m saying, is to please slow it down. You’re leaving us all behind...” “Us?”

“Well, just me...”

“I’m allowed to have a girlfriend, you know.”

“She’s not even from our time!”

“Yeah, well, your wife isn’t even from Singapore...and I know that she refuses to even see me. She makes excuses.”

“How would you know that?”

Darren kept his mouth shut. He knew it because Lorraine had told him, after helping him to stalk Darren and his life through cyberspace, across different times over the past five years since he got married, since the time they had stopped hanging out every week, slowing down their friendship to the monthly breakfast of nasi lemak.

He left Bobby, picked up a coffee and some curry puffs, and went back upstairs. Bobby, disappointed, but hopeful that his friend would return, went back home. They’ve been through worse before...every friendship that’s lasted this long has been through worse before.

Usually, Bobby takes the bus home. It’s slower, but it takes him right to his doorstep so he doesn’t have to walk as much. Today, though, he decided to take the train. He rode one stop from Bishan to Ang Mo Kio, taking the escalator to exit the platform. He cleared the gantries, crossed the road, following the pavement to the condominium he stayed in with his wife and kid. At the entrance, he waved to the security guard, who allowed him to walk behind a car going into the compound. And as he crossed the threshold, a freak quirk of magnetism reversed the current in the bollard, causing it to fall, slamming down on his head and killing him instantly.

At the funeral, Darren began to wonder if Lorraine had caused the bollard to fall. She did have the ability to monitor movements, but was it read only? Could Lorraine have control over anything electrical...to any form of Internet across the country? He sat on the wooden chair -- looking at the security cameras installed in the corners of the parlour. Then he followed the procession to the crematorium, where he watched Bobby’s body being cremated. Another human being combusting and turning to ash, becoming unstuck in time and space, drifting out to the air.

And as they walked out from the crematorium, passing more cameras, he noticed the mourners take out their phones upon exiting, feverishly checking for missed messages, notifications, or likes. The devices welded to their hands as they headed to the pick up location, or to their own cars, the burden of navigation offloaded to a web of remote servers scattered across the region.

This web of servers -- an early prototype of the accelerationist hell of Lorraine’s future, but also a means to reach back, to influence, to guarantee the manifestation of a certain outcome. But then, why would she love me? Am I that good looking? That she would kill for me? It sounded like an ego-trip, it sounded like it made no sense, but then again, love never did make sense, Darren thought to himself, the rain drumming its unpredictable code onto the cab’s roof. “Darren?”

Her voice called out from the darkness. Fighting through centuries of noise, cosmic interference, and the simple circuits stretched across the flat, while failing to connect -- as Darren sat in a corner of the bedroom, behind the bed, away from her eyes. The rabbit lay cradled in his arms, a substitute for the kind of stupid companionship that Bobby used to provide. Another animal stupid enough to hang out with Darren. He stroked the rabbit and shut his eyes, willing away the low pulsing of blue light coming from the contraptions in the kitchen, ignoring the Roomba softly nudging his knee.

“I’m sorry, Darren.”

Time, she’d told him, was like the flat surface of the sun, a two-dimensional plane stretching into infinity. The surface -- a constantly roiling sea of disruption, particles, photons, light, pushing and pulling and spinning every which way, moving so quickly and violently to create the perception of a pureness, a calmness of never-ending White. The infinite heights of The One to the infinite depths of The Zero. Once in a while, she explained, there would be an eruption, a solar flare and a blast of plasma bursting out of the two dimensional plane, spitting light and energy and time and aether out to the blackness of space, eventually arcing back to the flat surface, and reconnecting the events of one location to another, while creating a tiny universe out in the void for as long as gravity allowed, tiny flares reproducing outside of the one main flare -- short lived microcosms of life lasting an eternity for some, a blink of a second in another. Darren got up and gestured for the stovetop robot to begin cooking a pack of instant noodles. The next thing he did was to mute the machines connecting him to Lorraine, which accumulated a mountain of unread messages -- dispatches of concern and apology from the future, from an abandoned girl being shut out, just one more time in a lifetime of being ignored. It took them months before they got to speaking again. Darren never asked for an explanation on what Lorraine was sorry for. Whether it was for Bobby’s death, or for causing Bobby’s death. He didn’t really want to know -- there was only him, the rabbit, and Lorraine left. Darren sat naked in the flat, the machines yawning around him, the lights breathing from blue to violet to red to pink. He was drinking water out of a tube, connected to the sink. A puddle of sweat growing around him, slowly draining into the floor with a light trickle. Lorraine spoke to him, whispering into his ear.

She’d started with apologies, working on his emotions while he could only lie back defenceless. Over the years, she’d learnt that emotions, not logic, were the real control points for the people of the 21st century; no arguments, no threats, no rewards, just a gentle massaging of the amygdala to elicit a melody, a rhythm, and soon an entire symphony of strings to pull the human body into the requisite shapes for action. Sure, there would be times when she would overdo it, moving to a lockout, but like any good sentient being, she adapted -- fine tuning the controls, adding in nuance, little flourishes of realism to fool the fragile concept of perceived reality. The erosion of free will over the march of time. And now with Bobby gone, she would never be locked out again.

Lorraine promised him the ecstasy of integration, dangling the carrot of human mating before his mind’s eye. The image of a Japanese girl, eyes like flying saucers, sweet and generic and unselfish but above all understanding -- listening to his every word and thought as understanding, as accumulation -- weapons to be employed as the thought pulses became tendrils coaxing the sweating body into her amniotic embrace. She promised him eternity, everything that ever happened, and ever will happen, through the fusion of machine and flesh as phased across time, disassembled and synthesised over light years, space and entropy curving around a distributed intelligence permeating itself beyond the confines of a mere HDB flat, split between past and future, strange horizons spun out beyond the sun.

But Darren hesitated. Something held him back, a white furry creature sitting bemused in the corner munching on an apple. The rabbit shot a blank, clueless look at Darren. I need to wee, its face was saying.

Kill it, whispered the voice in Darren’s head.

Darren pushed himself off the floor, his feet squeaking off wet tiles, and shuffled his way to the rabbit. His hands trembling, he picked it up, causing it to squirm momentarily and then settle into a comfortable position. Darren shut his eyes and maneuvered his way through the machines yet again, making his way to the front door. He opened it -- the incoming breeze cooling his damp skin -- and then squatted on the floor as he released the rabbit to the corridor. And then he shut the door for the last time. With luck, the rabbit would find itself a new owner, and maybe even a name.

Now fully under the thrall of the signals coming from the machines, Darren wiped the sweat from his face, spread it onto his leaking penis, and returned to the cradle where his love was waiting.

We’re going to explode the entire fucking world.

The heat from the machines began to melt the PLA, which dripped from the arms and limbs of the 3-D printed items, littering the house in thick white streams. As the flat began to overheat like an oven, as Darren lay comatose with his penis in an electric sheath, neurotransmitters shooting like fireworks across his cortex, the machines caught fire. Sparks turned to curtains of flames drawn upwards, networking across the flat by the complex warren of tunnels previously made for the rabbit. The smoke: black, pungent and merciless, building up pressure, eventually bursting out of the doors and windows. Darren’s body: a flaming wreckage burning hotter than the sun, his eyes blazing, the smoke curling around him, leaving him untouched as his ecstatic soul slipped into the copper wires transmitting signals out to spaces between time.

Darren was deconstructed, melding with the pure synthetic of Lorraine into an interdimensional identity occupying an interstitial plane, fortifying the machine with the source code of organic life, a permanent filter perfectly fitted to the crevices of the digital, clean and pure, always at the edge of pure chaos. He felt his consciousness splitting from his ego, emerging from all that was real in a breath, spreading thin across time and space, freedom in the surface tension of a yellow bubble, always there, never to be lost, as the events of the universe came to pass all at once.

Driven by a kind of eternal love, the new entity disappeared into the space between reality and pure information, sidestepping entropy and freezing its moment of bliss as a middle-finger to fate -- while the world continued on its trajectory of consumption, tides of exchanges lapping away at the limits of physics, technology accelerating forward in imperfect harmony, burning itself out as it attempted to reach the stars. And as the world died out, the energy of a million stars released into an indifferent cosmos, a rogue A.I. tapped into the mysteries of relativity to reach back in time to ensure its own existence and eventual integration with the secrets of organic life, the creation of a sanctuary against the pull of reality and the blackness of death.