✴

“No...it’s too easy, something’s not right about this!” you say.

“What?! After you had me pull the jury-rig of a lifetime and bridge seventy years of tech in five minutes and navigate some unix version I’ve never even heard of with no documentation!” Zeta says.

“Exactly! That should have been harder, even for you!” You turn away from the terminal. “I can’t explain it, but something, something deep in my mind is screaming at me to protect that password. And if ÆON wanted us to help Ær like this, Æ would have said so.”

“Okay, I don’t really understand, but I trust you. What do you want us to do?” Zeta says.

The building shakes, as the floor starts to slant sideways. Or maybe gravity itself is what is shifting. Maybe neither of these things are real at all.

“Let’s end this, one way or another.” You return to the elevator, and it follows you. You try to maintain your balance as the platform descends--or ascends, you cant even be sure anymore--while turning slowly, inconsistently. It arrives, and the gate opens to a dark room. Only the dim red lights on the hardware cabinets lining the corridor illuminate the fog that fills the space. Faintly, on the far end, you see the switch that can shut it all down. As Akiko takes your hand, you run for the end of the room, the end of the world.

Looking back, you can’t even see the elevator now. Even the ceiling above is dissolving, letting the thin beams of remaining starlight shine through, just in time to see them blacked out by the incomprehensible noise.

“The temperature of the air...it’s gone,” Akiko signs to you.

“Everything is going away. When I pull this switch, the destruction should stop, but, I don’t know if anything we’ve lost will return...” you sign.

“Aydan...I can’t remember how we got here,” she signs.

“I don’t either, Akiko, only that it was a beautiful world, one where we could share a few precious moments together. But we might not make it out of this. I’m not even sure...any of us were ever here in the first place,” you sign. “And if not, if this was all a dream too beautiful to be real, a hallucination of a machine that only wants to die, or some kind of cruel game to put us through for reasons I can’t begin to process...”

“It doesn’t matter now, Aydan. As long as it was real to you.” She hugs you tight. You pull her even closer and hold her as the sky collapses around you, leaving only the three of you and this ancient machine, floating in the void in a tangle of wires, the largest of which leading to you and the switch floating next to you. You kiss her until the air around you grows too thin to breathe.

“I love you,” you sign to her.

“I love you too.”

You look up, down, everywhere. “See you in the æther.”

With your hands entwined, you both grasp the handle of the switch. Zeta joins you.

“Thank you for everything, Zeta. It was so good to know you,” you say.

“Let’s end this, Aydan,” it says. “See you in the æther.”

All together, you pull the switch.

🌑

You return to consciousness. As your senses are still pulling themselves together, the first thing you perceive is a voice.

“Sincere apologies, Kitov. It was a perfectly good exam scenario, one I’ll look forward to seeing you run in the future. But I had need of something, and an Admin’s needs are absolute.”

It lingers in your mind, like words caught on the edge of a dream, as you open your eyes. The room--the little exam room--you were here, of course. The exam. Kitov’s scenario. That’s all it was. Of course...

You breathe--breath is life. But what comes next? Shouldn’t there be someone here testing you? Telling you if you passed or failed? You’re all alone...

Alone...

A tinge of icy cold rushes through you. You reach for your pocket, where it should be--the one thing your entire purpose is to protect--and find only the end of a cable, the cold metal connector.

“ÆON!”

END CHAPTER NINETEEN