Chapter Eighteen #2
“You are the most deluded person I’ve ever met,” I told him, my voice shaking from the weight of my memories.
That fight with Kai, which had not been about the Center, after all, but this.
“Do you not see how wrong it is? To recognize the pain in the world, to have the intelligence and resources to actually help humanity improve, and to decide to merely profit off of it. To create wellness retreats, for fuck’s sake.
You are not healing anyone. You are selling a very expensive product to the very few people who can afford it while the rest of the world continues to suffer.
You are profiting from the disintegration of this reality.
You want humanity to fail, don’t you? You want to become indispensable to us.
You want normal people to spend decades saving money just to experience a year of delusion. ”
Staring down at me, tall and impermeable, unaffected by my words because why would he be, he only asked, “And what about Mr. Park?”
Instant catch of my breath—a dropping sensation in my stomach as if the room’s gravity had changed. “Park?” I croaked.
“Kai Alwyn Park,” he said, wielding each letter of each name like a weapon. “Do you no longer wish to be with him?”
Oh God, I thought, Kai.
Kai, whose consciousness was still floating in there, who at this very moment had no idea what was happening, who didn’t really mean to fight with me that night but had only defended the Center because, unlike me, his brain wasn’t rejecting the Program.
Because he perhaps needed the Program to escape his own pain, his own tragic history.
What a shock it was to imagine him in reality, the both of us, suffering at the same time and place on this earth, desperate enough for relief to do this to ourselves.
Another barrage of disjointed memories: the scent of his cologne, his hand holding mine as we made our way through Sullivan’s, his dark, gentle eyes when he said, You could do a lot of things to me, Anya. Disappointing me isn’t one of them.
Oh, but I would. And, God, we had never even loved each other in reality. We had never held each other’s hands, seen each other’s faces. We had never cooked in his tiny kitchen. We had never swum in the cold October sea. We had never made love late at night, murmuring promises in each other’s ears.
Kai Alwyn Park.
“I do not know this man,” I whispered, my breath as short and brittle as my memories of him.
And here Lawrence continued, the creator of all this misery, pressing me, unrelenting, “Only that you do know him, Ms. Larsson. Quite intimately, according to your cerebral metrics. And if you don’t return to him, all the memories he has of you will be deleted.
Your existence and personhood within the Program will be completely and irreversibly erased.
There’s no other way. The simulation must continue with or without you. ”
Helplessly, I sobbed, making no sound, just heaving into my palms, replaying in my mind our last moments together.
If you love me, you’ll come with me.
And if you love me, you’ll stay. Do you like this answer?
I could see now how cruel, how wretched it was of me to try and make him choose. Because it was an impossible choice. Because, in reality, we owed things to ourselves too, not just to each other.
Yes, I loved him. I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone, more than I thought myself capable of loving.
And I wanted to go back to him, go back for him, if only for a moment, if only to tell him just that.
But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Remaining there, in Nostalgia, Kai wasn’t just exiting my life but the entire vicinity of life.
As though he were dead, or at least trapped in a place similar to death.
A place forever closed off to the conscious and living.
The things we owe to ourselves.
In a feeble, broken voice I asked, “Will he ever wake up?”
“Mr. Park has signed up for our longest Program yet. Three years of simulated reality. He’s currently experiencing his second year,” revealed Lawrence.
“But, I’m afraid your relationship cannot exist outside of Nostalgia.
Typically, we erase the memories people accumulate during their time in the Programs before they’re awakened to prevent instances of derealization and psychosis.
That way people can keep all the positive feelings the simulation has given them and return to society without any sentimental attachment to the lives they led within the Programs. The only reason we didn’t immediately erase your memories is because you had such a severe psychosomatic reaction upon your awakening we had to make sure you were stable first.”
More tears streamed, hot and uncontrollable, down my face, and I clamped a hand over my mouth to muffle the ragged cry that wanted to escape me.
“He might remember,” I whimpered into my palm, and the words only made me feel more hopeless, for I could hear the sheer improbability of it in my own voice.
I couldn’t think of anything, not one tangible thing that could retrieve Kai from the vague realm of memory and bring him back to me in the real world.
“There is a chance,” said Lawrence flatly. “The subconscious mind is a vast and unpredictable realm. But I wouldn’t count on it. What I can do, however, is offer you a solution.”
My head jerked up from my palms. “I’ve had enough of your solutions,” I snarled.
Ignoring me, he continued, “You are stable enough now. Let us perform the memory deletion and relieve you from all this…frustration that you’re feeling.”
But it was not frustration. It was guilt. Guilt and shame, for to wipe away all Kai and I had shared, the understanding and happiness and love, no matter how brief or calibrated, seemed to be an even greater betrayal than not going back to him.
If I could turn back time, knowing everything, I would change nothing. I would love you all over again.
This was what we’d promised to each other, because subconsciously we’d known a separation was coming, that we were running out of time. And I had to believe that if he was given the choice, he would honor that promise, just like I was about to do.
Releasing the trapped breath from my lungs, I wiped my face with the back of my hand and regathered whatever composure I had left. “You’ve taken enough of my memories,” I told him. “No more.”
A furrow of confusion appeared between Lawrence’s brows that was quick to dissolve into a cold, humorless smile the moment he realized what I was talking about.
“Ms. Larsson, you cannot possibly be regretting your memory deletion. You saved yourself from a great deal of pain by erasing these memories.”
“I should have talked to someone. A real person.”
“Well, if I remember your case correctly, you were under professional supervision. And according to them, you weren’t making any progress.”
“I didn’t know then the things I know now,” I said, mostly to console myself.
But there was truth in it, too, wasn’t there?
Perhaps I was not the Anya from the Program, but I was not the person I’d been before it either, for I was able to see it clearly now: the miracle of my life.
A life filled with pain and adversity but also with the kindness of people I had taken for granted.
Professors and mentors and colleagues and lovers.
Yes, people could do a great deal of harm to each other, but they could also do a great deal of good.
They could transform each other, heal each other, form attachments that defied the forcefield of logic.
Because Kai was right. Because sometimes you did get a feeling with people.
Because there was something magical in the way people everywhere continued to come together to form systems and networks and communities with the sole purpose of proliferating life. More and more life.
“And what do you know now, Ms. Larsson?” asked Lawrence with an arrogance that stirred another whirl of emotion in me.
“That there is no dignity in suffering,” I told him, “but there is dignity in knowing why you are suffering. There is dignity in healing. There is dignity in failing to heal and trying again. There is dignity in asking for help. To be wiped away, to be left with no physical form, to be reduced to a character in a story after all I’ve been through—it is an insult.
I am real. I am a person. I am a human being.
And I will live as such. However I can, I will live. ”
His momentary silence was tense but remorseless.
Because in his mind I wasn’t a human being.
I was the target audience. “And yet,” he replied, sickly gratified, “you would have never come to this wonderful epiphany without experiencing the world I gave you. In the end, Nostalgia did help you. It did reveal and heal something in you. Because this is the answer. The peak of human development. The future of wellness.”
“You gave me a way out of my life. I found my way back to it. I did that. Not you.”
With another thin little smile, in an air of unreachable superiority, he declared, “You can hold on to your memories, Ms. Larsson. I will still be here when you’ll want to be rid of them.”
For a moment, all of my righteous rage stopped burning me from the inside, and a cold, ice-hard sensation dropped over my head. Oh God, I thought blearily, if I don’t get out of here, I might actually kill this man.
“I want to go home,” I gritted out.
“I’m afraid it will be a few days before your body is able to continue with its normal biological processes without Hive’s intervention.”
Breath hitching, I glanced down at my body, shrouded in the frail white sheet of the patient gown, seemingly unmarked by Hive’s technology.
It was all happening internally, I knew.
It was what I’d consented to. I would have done anything to stop the misery of existing in my own head for a mere day.
And that was exactly what I’d done. Anything.
How I was ever going to forgive myself for this, I didn’t know.
But I wanted to be forgiven. More than any promise of happiness, I wanted to be forgiven.
To finally begin the rotten work of loving myself.
“As long as it takes,” I muttered.
“Do you want us to notify your emergency contact?”
“Yes. Please.”
With a curt nod, Lawrence walked past the bed, cool and collected, his ultra-slender glasses glinting under the unpolluted brilliance of the overhead light.
Then, just before he reached the door, he turned and looked at me.
“I’m not a villain, Ms. Larsson. Hive is not your enemy.
Our purpose here is not to exploit and distress you.
We are honestly trying to make a difference in this world. ”
I sank into the bed, a chain of unprocessed thoughts and emotions dragging down my body. “How is this making a difference?” I wondered.
His shoulders dropped a fragment, and he let out a quiet, easy breath, almost revealing something of himself.
“You know,” he said in a surprisingly conversational manner, “the headset that connects you to the simulation and everyone else in it was originally developed for psychiatric use. It was meant to enable therapists to explore patients’ subconscious minds so that they could treat the root of their suffering.
Of course, it was never approved because of how unpredictable a connection like that can be in an uncontrolled environment.
That’s the problem with the real world. You connect two separate consciousnesses, and suddenly reality starts to bleed. ”
“Is the world really so irreparable?” I asked him, or maybe just myself. “Why not use all this energy and resources to fix what we already have?”
“You’re not listening to me, Ms. Larsson,” he said. “Reality is uncontrollable. You cannot fix what you cannot control.”
Quietly, without waiting for an answer, Lawrence lowered his face to the scanner by the side of the door and left the room.
Alone at last, I let my eyes close, conscious of nothing but the tedious mechanisms of my body, which still didn’t feel fully mine or fully here.
What happens now? I wondered numbly, and for the first time in my life I was completely out of answers. Even at my lowest, I’d had a plan to follow. Something to chase. Something to run away from. Someone to become. Never before had my future looked so blank and borderless.
One thing was revealed to me, at least. All of my previous beliefs of what constitutes a good life had been deluded and warped.
And so now I would have to build myself a new path, construct my life around a new idea.
Or maybe break free from this concept altogether, that there was, in fact, a right way to live and that my purpose on this earth was to find it.
Because what if the right way didn’t exist? What if it was all just… life?
This was the world I inherited, and the best, perhaps most rebellious thing I could do now was to try and find contentment within it.
To return to the archaic pleasure of everyday things, to seek the beauty in everything, to form community, to forgive the imperfections of others, the imperfections of myself, to indulge my curiosity, to learn, to cultivate empathy, to help, to grant myself time and space to suffer and to conquer this suffering, to become a true hedonist.
To live.
And to wait for him. So maybe, one day, we could experience this very strange world together.