🌘

Paralyzed by confusing, conflicting emotions, you reflect on your machine side for a more objective perspective. Your neural log tells all, and altering it is next to impossible. You open your message history with Zeta.

2254-08-23 10:43:04 Zeta > hey have you left yet? I wondered if you wanted to walk to class together

2254-08-23 10:47:07 Zeta > well I’ll see you there I guess?

2254-08-23 12:35:24 Zeta > are you okay Aydan?

2254-08-23 12:39:38 Zeta > I’m gonna come to your room and make sure everything’s okay? tell me if you want space though...

2254-08-23 13:49:12 Zeta > um I don’t know if you’ve gotten my messages but I’m here?

You missed all of these, somehow. Where have you been? What time is it?

2254-08-23 13:50:11

“Aydan? Are you okay?” Zeta says.

“I don’t know!” you say, grasping your hair and shaking your head. “I thought I was... and you... I...”

“Here, Aydan, sit down. Can I come in?” it says.

You nod back at it and slide back to fall onto your bed. It comes to sit next to you. “I was worried when you didn’t show up to Programming class.”

You look further into your system logs. Your brainwave record shows you’ve been asleep for the last twelve hours, after a long time in dissociation before that.

“I was asleep?”

“Well that might explain some things,” it says.

“Wait, but I was in the æther, I remember. I was talking to ÆON. Because I couldn’t sleep, for days, and ÆON said Æ might be able to help, and then... It’s hard to remember.”

“Things that happen in the æther are always hard to grasp on the surface,” it says. “What can you remember?”

“I synced with ÆON. And it was...pretty incomprehensible, I don’t know what else I expected, but...I had a sense that what I was seeing was real, nonetheless. But then...I thought it was the next day, I guess I was dreaming. But it was so completely real...