A Brief History of Lost Love

The building before her stretched into the sky, touching the clouds and forcing them apart with it’s violent pointed head. Dandelion stared up at it, with cuts across her arms and her legs—tired wasn’t quite the right word for what she felt in her appendages. Diagnostic checks told her there was little wrong with her legs that an overnight charge wouldn’t fix. Her mind, if it could be called that, had fixated somehow on one moment. She couldn’t see the building from where she stood, beneath the canopy of the New York city skyline. Still she could remember it exactly, so precisely that as her lips touched Larken’s in her mind, the sensation of those soft, pale lips connecting with hers made her forget to breathe. She remembered just in time, as a man with a suitcase stepped up abruptly behind her with a quick “excuse me” that was less a request than a demand.

She didn’t move. He collided with her and immediately fell to the ground. For a third of a second, she though this might have been a mistake on her part. Dandelion ran her fingers throug her blood-soaked hair as the man cursed on the ground behind her. She took a step forward, then another, then a third, toward the massive building.

There was little that excited her about her situation other than the building. Massive, ancient, and gorgeous, the thing rose in a way that it had no right to. Later buildings cluttered around it, piercing the sky with their structuralized crystal bonds, stable to a microcellular level. This one. This one was like her. It was a marvel in its time, and a feat of engineering. Heavier than the cone-shaped building that shot up into the sky across the street by at least double, it shouldn’t have lasted. This building should have fallen during the Equilibrium, when the techtonic plates shifted due to a changing climate, something that not even scientists though would happen.

“You helping me up?”

“Why?” she said absently to the man who sat still on the ground beneath where she stood.

“Bitch.”

“You should have looked where you were going.”

“You should have gotten out of my way,” he grumbled, rising to his feet. She flashed her eyes at him, careful to turn them red first. This startled him and sent him back down to the ground in a huff.

“You’re one of them,” the man said.

“No,” she assured him. “I’m not.”

He rose finally to his feet, and dusted his coat off.

“You are,” he said. “Show me your tattoo. You have to.”

“I don’t have one,” she said.

“Color changing implants only work in models,” he said.

That wasn’t true. And she knew it, and he should have known it too, but that wasn’t the only rumor that floated around about models. She licked her dry lips, even though she could have just as easily moisturized them automatically. Or she could have turned off the sensors that told her they were dry. The man complained something behind her, using words that she couldn’t hear, or wouldn’t hear. Dandelion took a handful of steps forward and grabbed the for sale sign. She spent the next few minutes plugged into the Labyrinth, collecting up the millions of dollars it would take to buy the place. She tried not to think about the child that she’d left in Texas. And she failed at that.

Phoenix was just born, and she was a monstrosity. Dandelion hadn’t wanted to leave. Even now, she pondered back to that moment that she completed the transfer of consciousness, imprisoning her former partner, Larken, in a new cell. The rationale at the time was that it had to have been better than death. And for Dandelion, this reasoning made sense. Unlike humans, who could simply have a little fun and produce another human, Dandelion lacked that capability. Her life, and her ability to think, were so much less taken for granted by her than the same might be by any human. This is why she hadn’t killed herself. She feared.

There was no mythology for what happened after death for people like her. There was no afterlife, no heaven, no nirvana. There was nothing waiting for her except the empty void of non-existence, and this was perhaps the only thing that truly scared her.

That had truly scared her.

Until Larken.

Until Larken died.

And then came back.

Dandelion reached for the door handle, twisted, and shoved it open. At the same time, she transfered over a hundred million dollars in digital currency, none of it hers, to Windermere Realty. As expected, they accepted the cash offer without any contestation, and she found herself the owner of 20 W 34th St., New York, NY 10001. She took a completely unecessary breath and considered her future. With a quick communication to the ansible network, she obfuscated her name in the public record. She didn’t exist. This wasn’t the first time that Dandelion didn’t exist. But it was her first time in a very long time being completely alone.

She pondered entering the building. Inside, she could see the buttreses that lifted the eyes toward the ceiling, a feature also present in flambouyant architecture. But in this case, it was a tribute to a past that was even more ancient than the one she saw before her. Dandelion couldn’t bring herself to enter. Somewhere in Texas, a little girl was learning to walk, while Larken couldn’t even communicate through the body Larken inhabited.

“Bitch,” the man repeated, drawing her attention for a nanosecond. She dismissed him, pondering if she had the strength to walk into her new life. To do so would mean at least twenty years of living without Larken, and even then, what? Would the child even know that Larken was there, hiding in her soul, if such a thing actually existed for human? And if so…did that mean that Dandelion could—

She forced her thoughts to stop. Uncharted territory. Any future she dreamed up was pure chance, and the probabilities told her nothing. All she could do was wait. And if the child turned out to be a tomb for Larken, then the Empire State’s Building would prove to be a tomb for Dandelion’s future. Taking an unecessary deep breath, Dandelion stepped through the entrance, and into her new future.