Could You Rest Here, Next to Me?

“Knew you’d be here.” She was going to leave a wide gap between him and herself, considering there’s plenty of driftwood to lean on, but at the sound of her voice he scooched over, an unspoken invitation to sit closer. So she did, thighs scratchy with sand still warm from basking in the now setting sun, her shoulder pressed against his, the ocean breeze carrying a familiar scent in its drift.

“Came all the way down just to sit with me?” After a while, he broke the silence along with his gaze on the glimmering waters, now fixated on her with a gentle smile.

“Uh, thanks for asking, life’s been treating me well. And it’s nice to finally see you too.” She tried to pull up a playful smile, but his banter catalyzed her excitement into a degree of nervousness, so she glued her eyes on the waves, doing her best to ignore the inquisitive gaze studying her face, “I came here to set things right…” she took a deep breath, “…you were right, all along. I was too stubborn and self-centered for my own good…maybe I still am.”

“Good girl, making peace with her past.” He nodded, trying not to grin at the sight of a woman in her fifties being so serious with the timid guilt of a child, “It’s good that we’re here. Means that your therapist is doing their job.”

“I really mean it. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. That’s all I came here to tell you.” Suppressing the trembles that had crept in, she inhaled again, “You were right, I took unnecessary pains fussing over insignificant stuff, always overanalyzing, thinking I’d be in control. But it’s what made us fall apart. It’s just…I thought it was the only way for me to go places, to be someone…just…I was trapped in this tunnel vision to stand out…back then.”

“Hey, there’s no need to apologize for the feelings that came to you. I shouldn’t have said things.” Seeing her on the verge of tears, he finally let sincerity come through, “Let’s be fair, you did great, I mean look at you, extremely accomplished in everything you do.”

Not getting any reactions out of her, he went on, “Hey, go easy on yourself. Have some mercy on the rest of us without awards or billions.”

“I worked so hard to earn all that… but what for? At the end of the day, I don’t even have someone to share the joy or laugh and cry with…someone to embrace me, who truly sees me. Someone to—” she sighed in admittance of defeat, “someone I could call my own.” 

“Don’t say that. You have friends who are always there for you.” Even though his tone grew firm, his eyes retained their tenderly attentive nature, “Know that you are loved.”

“But I let the love of my life go.” Turning abruptly towards him, she looked him in the eye for the first time, only to realize how close they’d sat. Nesting lovebirds. She bit herself, trying to hide the shivers, but she knew that her eyes had already betrayed her. So she let her glance droop, resting her gaze on his hand. Protruding knuckles and slender fingers partly buried in the sand; a band of glistening silver glared back. She muttered, “I missed the chance to be truly happy.”

“I thought you were happy. Doing what you loved, that’s why you did it so well.” Lifting his index finger to his temple, he hushed to a whisper but raised his pitch to match the liveliness of her voice in his memory, “Like fireworks going off in here!”

She chuckled. His impression brought back the old times, when everything was still vividly vibrant with unfading earnestness, except that she could really see herself this time. Stubborn with a bravery perched on unfounded hopes. Yet she survived, for some other thing took her place in the grave.

Encouraged by her lightened expression, he went on, “I fell for it didn’t I—this is how you’d fish for compliments. After all these years, the master humblebragger has finally decided to grace me with her presence. Well then, her majesty better listen up.” With a turn of his torso, he faces her; a fantasy bubbling inside her for a split second of being in his arms, “You need to realize how extraordinary you are. Not only for how much you care for everything and everyone, but you are the most talented and beautiful soul I’ve ever laid eyes on. Your undaunted spirit to go against all odds inspires us, all of us.” Lost in an inward gaze, he surrendered, “Me the most. Back then, when we could still spend time together.”

Suddenly, it cleared up. The tremendous weight that once suffocated her now seemed laughable. Softening herself, she beamed with a roll of her eyes, “You know that embarrassing, cheesy comments like this should be saved for eulogies—”

And that’s when her lips met his. Mid-speech. She recalls registering him leaning in, as if in slow motion, but the only thing etched in her memory was his wounded confusion as he’s being shoved away.

“Don’t make me think less of you.” In the stupefying daze, those were the only words she managed to muster. She pointed to his ring finger, noticing the surprise and bewilderment as they overtook his face. The shining semicircle of a sun still languidly hangs on, scattering bands of golden pink onto the grey surface below. Only now did she realize how quiet this beach is. Unable to bear his silence but finding no other distractions, she got up to leave.

When she turned to look back for the last time, he has taken off the ring and is now examining it through the ethereal blushing light.

#

She was hesitant to approach the familiar silhouette when she saw him again by the beach. She thought of turning back to go to sleep for the day, but she knew that something must be done to wring what happened last week out of her mind. The kiss haunted her, flashing playfully in her subconsciousness whenever she tries to focus, blowing itself up authoritatively to colonize her entire mental space whenever she tries to relax, even though she barely got to enjoy its fleeting existence. Three days before, she had decided that this cannot go on, though it wasn't until today that she had gathered enough courage to get this over with. And now, she carefully churns over the pros and cons of just ending today with sleep. Against the coral-colored sky, his broad shoulders leaned still against the log, harbouring her peace of mind with the promise of awaiting closure.

“Nice to see you here…again.” She regretted the words the second they came out, but he didn’t seem to react. Instead of greeting her with his endearing teases that she grew to reminisce so much about, he held out his left palm. In the middle sits the silver ring, emitting a chilly glow in the sunset.

“I was here recently.” She didn’t know what he was doing or how to react, so she continued with her thought-out script, “Thought you’d like it too. You know. As a change of scenery.”

In a split second they were in an amphitheatre, its colossal glory of the fallen empire engulfing every last bit of the beachside serenity that lingered in the air. Yet he remained unmoved. She didn’t know what to do for a while, so she studied him intensely, but not a trace of change can be observed in his expression. He looked directly at her as if everything else never existed, eyes imploring with honesty that ignited the unease in her stomach to an acute burn, and he said, “Will you…Please. Let me see my wife.”

And that’s when she disconnected. 

#

Every technician and scientist on site could see that she was furious with humiliation the second she busted through the doors after midnight.

“What the fuck? He’s not supposed to do that.” All courtesy out the window, she charged directly at the senior researcher. “I want an MRI right now. And I’m suing you for whatever’s happening in my cranial separation. And you can all count on being fucking fired if you don’t fix this. Now.”

“Let’s go through a breathing exercise before I explain. Your excreted catecholamines, adrenaline, and cortisol cannot help but make the situation worse by affecting the ICS—the isolated cranial subregion—negatively.” The researcher intentionally cast out a few jargons, hoping she would become distracted enough to mitigate any punishments she’s about to throw, “Now close your eyes, inhale…exhale…inhale…exhale…inhale…” The researcher did not direct her to her last exhale because a lungful of air is needed for what’s about to come. “Now walk us through as to what happened?”

“I funded you guys and personally signed up as a lab rat for this crap because I was promised—you promised me—that things are under control. He’s not supposed to be sentient, conscious, self-aware, whatever that means. Look, you need to make up for your failure. The only thing I asked from this project was to spend more time with my soulmate, for him to truly be with me, because, as I’ve said before, an accident took his life before we could ever reunite. Now. You told me that his existence is made of my brain cells, so he’d never, ever, get any thoughts or ideas that I wouldn’t have. Then explain to me, how and why on earth would he ask to be with his fucking wife?”

Seeing that she got herself upset again, the researcher resorted to the previous strategy of flooding her rage with technical terms. “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page. It is true that we’ve partitioned a subset of your neurons to make ‘him’, then implemented pathways that mediate input stimulation to and output responses from those neurons. We did not fail your request: you can interact with ‘him’ whenever you want, by simply imagining it happen. It is true that because this recreation of ‘him’ is computed by neurons in the ICS—neurons that were once yours, so to speak—it’s impossible for the simulated personality of ‘him’ to deviate from your memory of what he’s like. Lastly, it is true that you can no longer feel the consciousness that’s active in the ICS, which makes your conversations with ‘him’ all the more convincing, but I can assure you that at the end of the day, ‘he’ is made from you. Although we integrated external functional nanodevices into the ICS, these only carried selected information based on contents from his social media in the past 20 years. This was also done at your request; you wanted to age ‘him’—well, at least ‘his’ appearance—from the late adolescent whom you’ve last met. Thus, we augmented your neurons in the ICS with information like—like that picture of him at the beach. Beautiful sunset, remember?” The researcher conjured up the most disarming smile imaginable.

“Fifty years in this field and you can’t even say ‘don’t worry, we’ll fix this’. Offer me a solution. I don’t care for the details.” Her anger has chilled into a cruel and practicality-oriented stubbornness that’s foreign to researchers at the frontier of human knowledge.

“There’s still potential for the best outcome. Please work with us.” The researcher realized that giving her a chance to speak was a mistake, “This anomaly could be due to you informing ‘him’ of his marriage, and you having the impression of him as a responsible family man before the ICS was sectioned off. Because these biological neurons computing ‘his’ role do not go into a static state like unused electronics do, in other words, neural oscillations are always observed in the ICS whether you’re with ‘him’ or not, it’s possible that the neurons have…” fascinated with this discovery, the researcher must be very careful with word choice here, “progressed, or advanced, ‘him’, based not only on your last memory of him and our augmented data, but also on your inputs during the interactions. Since physical neurons and their oscillatory activities naturally make up a ‘thinking-self’, it could be the case for what’s happened in the ICS. After all, these neurons were once your ‘thinking-self’, too. Ah, I see now, we overlooked one thing in containing ‘him’: only isolating your sensory inputs—what you see, taste, hear, feel—along with your consciousness in the rest of your brain from the ICS is not enough to quarantine ‘him’ and maintain its personality purity to be in complete accordance with your memories and desires. We must also insulate external interactions between you and ‘him’ from it, too.”

“Hmm. From an actor in my play to an ornamental piece in my brain.” She played around with the two ideas for a while, and finally spoke up, “That wouldn’t be necessary; I can talk to him and convince him. I apologize for the discourteous manner earlier. I’ve just realized that since we brought him back to life, I should respect the agency and free will that comes along. I trust the years between us will help him come to a sensible conclusion.”

She thought about the kiss.