Root Two - Part 7/9
This is Part 7 of “Root Two,” a serialized novella about coding by someone who has never coded. Surprise! But hey, you made it this far.
If you need to catch up, you can find:
[Est. reading time: 7 minutes]
There are some things so good it seems wrong to write about them. So I won't.
Suffice it to say I stayed the night, and in the morning, I found a note. Handwritten. Concise, but not without affection. She had a deadline, apparently.
It was strange to be alone in her apartment, so I didn't stay. I rode home on a wave of warm bliss. I'd never felt anything like it before. It was a new kind of happy.
When I got back to my own apartment, I sank back down closer to the ground and realized that the drive to solve the Candlelight Mystery (why hadn't I come up with that before??) was gone. Whatever it was, it didn't matter, and I was out of leads, out of clues, out of ideas. But mostly, the mania that had been driving me was gone.
So I emailed Bao Lee, told him pretty much everything, apologized, and let it go.
I also updated Hemmy and Bert, then got busy reviewing the preFORMA contract, which was due in a few days. Plenty of time, as long as I didn't put it off anymore.
Pretty soon it was lunch, and one of the best 24-hour stretches of my life came to an abrupt end.
I re-read the message I'd sent before I left her apartment that morning.
Sorry I missed you. Let me know when you want to get together again.
That message had cost an average of three minutes per word. "If" almost won out over "when," but I had ultimately decided it sounded like I was bating some kind of conflict. Better to assume the best. Of course she wanted to see me again. Of course she did.
It's not like I got WORRIED after I ate lunch and she hadn't responded, but that's the moment I started waiting for it like it was my job.
A really shitty job.
Some dispassionate part of my brain marveled at how quickly I came to pieces as the minutes congealed into hours. Then night came, and the only thing that made any sense to do was to start drinking very expensive alcohol again.
To my everlasting credit, I didn't send any more messages. Gone were the days of ambiguity about whether a message had been received. I knew.
The very dark night passed with no sleep, despite my efforts to intoxicate myself into oblivion. When the very drunk morning finally arrived, the only cogent thought in my brain was that this was all Hemmy's fault. I decided he and I were going to have some words, and stumbled my way into another car that knew better than to let humans like me drive it.
My memory of what followed is not perfect, but I'll do my best to set the scene.
Me, unshowered, mostly blind.
Bert, working quietly at his desk.
Hemmy, building some kind of mess in the middle of the office.
"Cyn!" he shouted. "You're alive."
"The FUCK you do it for?"
"Do what?"
"She GHOSTED me, man. She ghosted me. We...and..."
It would be nice to not remember the next bit, but oh well: I threw up on the floor.
"Holy shit," Hemmy said.
Bert produced a bottle of water for me, then went to work cleaning up my mess.
Hemmy guided me toward the one big couch in our office.
"Here, here. Take it easy."
I tried to explain what had happened, but I was incoherent.
It's possible I started crying. OK, yes. Definitely I cried. A lot. Clinging, gasping, volcanic crying. Not my proudest moment. Worse than emptying a heterogenous mixture of gin and bile onto the floor.
They were both genuinely concerned. Coddling me like a kid sister. It was sweet, in the moment. I fell asleep.
When I woke up, the daylight was gone, the only light coming from Hemmy's screen. Bert was gone, too.
"I'm gonna die," I said.
Hemmy came over. "Be easy to think you never had your heart broken before."
"No one gets a broken heart after one night. I'm a lunatic. I don't know what's wrong with me."
"You're not a lunatic. Nothing is wrong with you."
"Agree to disagree. Do you see my brain coming out of my eyes? It feels like my brain...is coming out of my eyes."
I winced so hard I saw a black and white movie. One of the silent ones where everyone is moving too fast.
"I'm sorry," I said. "We've got actual work to do. I should have been here." I tried to stand up. My intention was to get to work.
"It's 4am," Hemmy said. "You need to eat something real, and I need to sleep. But we'll do your thing first."
I let him walk me out of the office, into the quiet night, anonymous riders whispering by at a trickle.
Being sober was horrible. My head wanted to come apart down the middle, and I couldn't get away from the memory of KrisLove's touch. Her closeness. The way she asked questions that didn't need answers.
I was crying again, but Hemmy just let me. I was grateful.
The streets were safe, despite the hour, thanks to 24-hour AI surveillance. We, the citizenry, had been assured that actual human beings weren't spying on us, that the cameras and motion sensors and smartdust scattered everywhere were only passively keeping watch, triggered only by true distress and need. No more dark alleys and a 95% drop in violent crime made the official story go down easier.
We made our way into a diner with vending machines as hosts, got food that had been fried many hours hence, then took our seats under lights that had not been calibrated for human comfort.
After some silent eating, Hemmy eventually asked where I'd gotten all that alcohol.
"It's a bad habit," I said.
"Gotta spend your money on something," he shrugged.
"What do you spend yours on?"
"Custom skins and renders. Whatever."
"Your digital harem."
"Those things are actually way less expensive than a lot of the specialty mods."
I laughed, and so did he. We made so much money, and wasted all of it. True Americans.
After a little bit, he said, "I'm really sorry about what happened."
He looked so guilty it made me feel bad for barging in with bad language earlier, drunk or no. "It's not your fault," I said.
"Well." He took a long pause. "I was the one who set you up."
"So? It was my decision to go, my weird bullshit that drove her off, and my decision to hunt her down again. Over the same bullshit! She was probably playing me from the moment she replied to my email."
Hemmy shifted. "Yeah," he said, unconvincingly.
"I'm serious. Let it go. I have!" I chirped, straightening and smoothing back my hair.
He gazed at me for a beat, then grunted a laugh.
After a little while, we ceded the morning to the normal world. But before we went our separate ways, Hemmy put his hand on my arm and said, "Take another day. We'll be fine. Get some sleep. And no more drinking."
I smiled my tight-lipped smile.
When I got home, I didn't feel better. Of course I didn't. All my hurt feelings had grown more potent with fermentation. It was hard just to walk around.
But my head was quieter, at least.
I had said all the words — the ones about how stupid I was, how weird and unloveable. How my parents and older brother were right never to call. About how much I hated all the people who ever said that money can't buy happiness for being smug sons of bitches.
About how I had no right to be unhappy. That somehow there were still people in the world — poor, starving, or worse — whose lives were infinitely worse than mine, and what kind of a perfect asshole did I have to be to suck in so much of the world's supply of self-pity?
About how hating myself was just one more defense mechanism against the pain that I couldn't handle, because I was weak.
All the words. Written down in a big fat book. Sitting on a podium in my mind like an old Oxford English Dictionary, always available for reference.
I was so tired.
When I closed my eyes, I saw myself in the quiet library of my mind, casually leafing through the wide, wide pages of that enormous book.
Go ahead, Cynthia. Sleep right on through the day.
***
My dreams aren't vivid, which is why this one made an impression.
I was in the restaurant. Again. Staring at the flickering candle. Watching the numbers tumble out in binary.
Across the table, KrisLove watched me
Then, suddenly, she bent forward and blew the candle out.
"It's OK," she said in the darkness. "It isn't real."
"I know," I heard myself say, and the clear sound of my voice woke me up.
What? I thought. What do I know?
There was some notion, fleeting as dream thoughts always are, that seemed important.
It was a fake.
That cafe, that candle. Not in the sense that all VR is fake, but in the sense that the place KrisLove had met me in was counterfeit.
I knew this. It's not that there were no other explanations, but somehow, in that moment, waking up from that dream, I was certain that I had been tricked into a fake.
Now all I needed was proof.
Two more chapters to go. Now would be a very good time to invite a friend to read along with you. So here’s this big orange button to help you go ahead and do that:
Okay. Ummm. Okay. Soooo you sandwiched this post with like the best opening line two sentences, and the final two sentences. Holy wow. Super can't wait until next week - ahh!