He pressed further: “Do you understand me?”
She cycled through a dozen tongues, some known to him, and some not, before arriving at the one he’d used to address her. “Can I help you?”
“Will you accept my company?”
“I wasn’t looking for company, but I don’t specifically object to it. I am willing to discuss anything but politics, morality, or the flattening effect of multiplying temporal paradoxes.”
“My full name is Adam Splendor Sadness Feline Igneous Ultimate Never Cul-De-Sac Untoward Synchronicity Leverage Cystic Beverage Arrogance Wholly Thirteen Cunnilingus Hummingbird Multiplication Kayn. You can call me Kayn.”
She provided her name, not a spoken syllable but a blast of tropical warmth, humid and filled with peat. “You can call me Peat. Please sit.”
“All right.” He sat opposite her, and let the table generate a meal for him, utensils and all. There was no mucking about with menus, sentient or otherwise. The establishment had tasted him and determined just what combination of foodstuffs was most appropriate for his current mood. What came, rising out of the solid table like the sun coming up on the horizon, was a bowl of something moving, something clearly sentient and alive, something that sang in soft, mournful despair as it awaited slaughter at the tip of his heated, six-pronged fork. He didn’t make it wait for very long, just stabbed through its tiny skull with one ruthless thrust, and lifted it to his mouth, feeling satiated as its death throes distributed what flavor it had. This had long been one of his favorite dishes. But today it was oily and bland, and when he was done chewing, it left an unpleasant gritty residue between his teeth. It was as if the sand of the surrounding desert had gotten into the synthesizers themselves.
She noted his displeasure and said, “You’re surprised. You must have been gone for a while. Orgynism?”
“Yes.”
“I was in one, about eight hundred years ago. It was a big one, with over a thousand participants, at its peak. It was bliss until one near the center went insane and started chewing his way out. I’m still missing some toes. How long have you been out?”
He told her.
“That explains your reaction to the food. You’re new to the way things have been falling apart.”
“I notice you’re not eating either.”
“I never do. I have no stomach. No internal organs of any kind. This,” she said, drumming her silvery digits on the table, “is what I’m made of now. I suppose I’ll last longer this way, when the city’s gone.”
“So it’s not a rumor.”
“No.”
He pointed at her food. “You ordered.”
“I wanted to sit. The table provided. But I outgrew food long ago. You should, too. The city won’t be making much more of it.”
He remembered the predictions of the shit-thing. “How much time do you think we still have? Months? Years? Centuries?”
“Who cares? It’s not like this place is fun anymore. We’ve seen everything. We’ve done everything. I’m only alive out of inertia.”
He said, “Up for suicide? I’ll join you, if that’s what you want.”
“I’ve done that,” Peat replied. “It didn’t take.”
“Then let’s get married.”
“I’ve done that a couple of dozen times, too. Once with you, in fact, though we weren’t the only people involved. But if you’d like to be in love for a while, just to pass the time, I’m willing to do that.”
“All right,” said Kayn.
Their courtship over, they both left the table, to make the necessary arrangements.
They didn’t know each other and didn’t like each other much, but that was no longer an inconvenience, not when they were both available and there were still working machines dispensing love. It was just a matter of recalibrating their internal referents and setting what intensity they wanted, from mild affection to all-out raging, clothes-shredding passion. The first through fourth of the stations they investigated were all derelict, three merely devoid of power and one incapable of producing anything but flatulent noises, but the fifth they found, in a vacant bazaar on the seventh level of the abandoned Third Church of Gilgul the Materialist, was still capable of producing Love at some settings, albeit none of the better ones. As per his lifelong habit as a man more comfortable with receiving that emotion than feeling it, he took a dose two notches lower than hers, and felt a surge of deep affection while she elected to feel something more, something rich and genuine and pure.
There was no chance of a standard honeymoon night, not that he wanted one, after the sexual surfeit of his recent centuries. He may have still possessed the parts, but she did not. But companionship, she provided. They shared a bed and sometimes a vat, and during the days they wandered the city, noting all the places that still existed and those that were still a ghost of what they had used to be.
They went to the Cinema, the last Cinema, a place that had been established millennia before, where mechanisms behind the screen projected a perpetual story compelling enough to be joined or abandoned at any point, without any sense that one had missed something. Alas, something primal had been lost over the years. In Kayn’s youth, the story had been an intricate saga of intrigue in the court of some medieval kingdom, driven by subtle turns of character and shifts of power dynamics among a cast of thousands. It had once kept him in his seat, being fed and tended by bots, for more than a month before the sameness overwhelmed him and he’d wandered out of the auditorium looking for a place to set some bombs. Years later, he’d returned, and the story had contracted to two men, armed with knives, grappling with one another in the center of a field of corpses. He’d spent a day watching them cut little strips of flesh off one another’s bodies, discerned no story, and left. Now, returning with Peat to an auditorium ankle-deep in sand occupied by a half-dozen dusty patrons he recognized from his earlier visits and who he presumed to have been watching the entire saga from the beginning, he found that the story had contracted still further: It was now a man forever punching a solid wall with the wrist-nubs that were all that remained of his arms, after his fists had eroded from an unimaginable number of constant impacts. “The machines are stuck,” Peat explained. “They used to be able to introduce new characters, establish new plot developments, create brand-new complications capable of carrying the narrative to new places, but in recent years they’ve been deteriorating. The narrative’s become fossilized. You can sit for years waiting for something different to happen.”
“It’s a great unintentional metaphor,” said Kayn.
The two of them stayed six hours, just watching the unfortunate on screen pummel the wall, waiting for something else to happen, anything else to happen. Nothing did, and they ultimately left in search of new adventures.
They found an abandoned building where Peat said that she’d lived once, a tower now leaning seventeen degrees which once would have been righted or had its architectural deficiency incorporated as a fresh source of novelty, and scaled the exterior to the summit, one hundred and forty stories above the avenue below. The apartment they found there was infested with spiders, and criss-crossed with vast curtains of webbing. The tenants, three women and one man, were cocooned and in the process of being digested, but did not seem to mind. One explained to Kayn that the spiders made such wonderful music. Kayn could detect nothing. Peat said that she could: “It’s just above your range of hearing, Kayn.”