When it’s nearly midnight in Mombasa, Ostap peels off his gloves. They tried sleeping in the linkwear once, but it wasn’t comfortable—it’s better saved for dancing or used together with Alyce’s wireless toys.
“You going to take the linkwear to work with you tomorrow?” he asks. “That way I’d be there for the history-making. You know, in spirit.”
Alyce laughs. “Maybe.”
“Goodnight. Good luck with the test.” Ostap pauses, grasping for syllables, then uses the last third of his newly-learned Swahili. “Ninakupenda.”
Alyce is quiet for a moment that seems like forever, then makes a satisfied noise in her throat. “I love you too.”
“My mistake,” Ostap says. “I thought that meant ‘I’m looking for the washroom.’”
“Sure.” Alyce’s lip twitches. “I love you too, asshole.”
Ostap kisses the air just before she ends the call.
At approximately 5:30AM local time, emergency services responded to multiple automated and human reports of an incident at the Nguyen-Bohr superlab located outside the Kenyan city of Mombasa. First responders extinguished an electrical fire at the entrance of the facility, but upon entering were unable to locate the seven members of the science team logged as present at the time of the incident.
A witness described the scene as “unreal, catastrophic,” and drone-captured images [see below] show the extensive nature of the damage, in which large chunks of the concrete structure and surrounding earth seem to have been torn away.
The superlab, which is the largest of its kind in the world, is used to study quantum phenomena. An experiment involving possible FTL particle travel was scheduled to occur today, but due to the nature of the damage, no autologs have been recovered. The Mombasa Fire Brigade suggested that bodies may be unrecoverable for the same reason.
The last guests have left and Ostap is pouring out the leftover wine, balefully watching Merlot glug and splash into his steel sink. All he wants to do is drink. He wants to drink until the alcohol hollows him out to a dull happiness, spins him a warm protective cocoon to keep him that way until morning. Ostap was never a maudlin drunk.
But he was an alcoholic. Which is why an implant in his stomach, a tiny origami enzyme factory, now breaks down any alcohol long before he can absorb it. Alyce paid for half of the surgery, since he was still treading debt at the time. It felt like love then. It now feels like a middle finger from beyond the grave.
Ostap sets the empty bottle on the counter and looks around his apartment. There are still a few glasses here and there, dregs turning sticky in the bottoms. His roving end table has returned to its usual spot by the sofa with the remainders of the spring rolls and seaweed chips. Reginald, the autocleaner he and Alyce named together one silly night, is wiping a splatter of dipping sauce off the floor. Above it, the smartwall is still flickering clips and snaps of her. People wrote little notes on them with a stylus or just their fingers.
The memorial party was a bad idea. One of Alyce’s friends from Uni asked him to host it, because his apartment is central, and he agreed because he hardly leaves it anyways these days. And secretly, he hoped it might help in some way the wake and funeral had not.
Instead, the night was a collision of awkward physics types and over-dramatic artists, all of whom seemed to have come just to give him pitying looks or too-tight hugs or snippets of advice like you can always talk to someone and don’t start memory archiving or you’ll be in there forever.
And he had to thank them and pretend like he hadn’t spent the past week lying boneless on his couch watching every single second he and Alyce had recorded together. He’d tried to get rid of the goggle marks around his eyes with cold water and vigorous rubbing before people started arriving, but it hadn’t worked.
Almost worse than being pitied was having to pity them all back. Some of them had known Alyce since they were only kids, which made him feel a strange mixture of sympathy, because they had lost more of her than he had, and jealousy, for the same reason. He spent a good chunk of the party hiding in the bathroom, where the tiny knots he has felt in his stomach for weeks knotted themselves even tighter.
Now, staring at the wall of notes he agreed to upload somewhere, he wonders if he deserves to be sad at all. Compared to her friends and family who have known her forever, he is an interloper. His status is inflated only because he was the last person to be in love with her: as if sleeping with her for a year and one month makes his grief just as valid as theirs. He feels like he knew her better than anyone, but it’s a half-hormones illusion.
And he can’t even get drunk.
Reginald jostles him on its way to load the empty glasses into the dishwasher. Without thinking, Ostap gives it a savage kick. The little robot sails across the room; it manages to keep hold of the glasses but one shatters anyway when it smashes to the faux-wood floor.
Ostap watches Reginald rock back and forth on its white plastic shell, trying to right itself. Something about it triggers the tears that have been building up behind his eyes all night. They spill out and down his cheeks, salty hot, as he goes over to crouch beside the autocleaner.
“Sorry.” He flips it over gently. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean it.”
He sits cross-legged, patting Reginald on the back as it starts to wolf down the shards of broken glass. He wipes his eyes with the back of his right hand then wipes his nose with the back of his left. Squints at the smartwall, which is cycling through snaps from Alyce’s last birthday: they went to an overpriced restaurant on the wharf where all the servers wore chamsuits to be less obtrusive, and spent half the evening thanking thin air.
The snap shows Alyce grinning, triumphant, because they managed to catch one in the background. A server had been rolling down the neck of their chamsuit to scratch themselves, placing a tiny sliver of skin beside a levitating drinks tray. From the look on your face, Ostap used to tell her, you’d think it was hard evidence of extraterrestrial life.
He slumps down so he’s lying on the floor of his apartment. He wants to clear the notes and images away, play music loud enough to swallow the sound of his undignified snuffling, but he can’t choke out either command. So he just lies there, listening to his own ragged breathing and to Reginald’s shuffling feet.
Then he hears something else: the soft rustling of smartfabric flexing against itself. He stops crying. Stops breathing. Dangling from the hook on his wall, the linkwear he hasn’t touched for a month is coming online. Ostap gets to his feet. The blue status lights pulse and he is drawn to them like a moth; he staggers to the wall, suspecting that he is dreaming again.
With trembling hands, he lifts the shirt off its hook and pulls it over his head. When the company gathered up all of Alyce’s things and shipped them back to her parents in Antwerp, the linkwear never made it. Ostap knows because he asked Alyce’s mother, who said no, nothing like that, probably some sticky-fingered neighbor made off with it.
But there’s another possibility. Maybe Alyce really did take it with her to the lab on the day things all went to hell. As a way for him to almost be there. Ostap puts on the gloves. With his pulse pounding, he goes to the taped footprints in the center of his apartment and closes his eyes.