This is Jimmy, full of blood.
She wanted to see the rainforest. They wanted me to train for the inevitable, but I took her there anyway. Up from the impenetrable sphere nestled in the stone, to walk bare against the sky. Sweet air wrapped us and kept her soft body safe.
"To the rainforest," I said, and she smiled. I cradled her and ran. When the wind was too strong, I stretched my hand across her, and when I leapt onto the sea I grew fins of ice to swim across the world. In minutes I was a crystal whale beached on another continent.
"That was amazing," she said. I think she was afraid.
I wanted to tell her that conventions of physics and chemistry were no more binding to her whim than a breeze. It would have only reminded her that I was no longer human. No mere person could carry her across a world in his heart.
"Let's walk," I said, instead. And we walked.
I opened my mouth to talk, but I couldn't think of anything to say. The easy rapport we had shared when I was robed in meat had become elusive. We had nothing in common. My eyes itched, in my mind. My real eyes were spheres of glass, rotated at will for effect. No, my real eyes were frozen in a tank a world away, with my real body, my real heart. Two kelvin. It was 304.873 kelvins here. Her skin was 309.680.
And then the temperature dropped. The sun darkened. She looked up at the blackness and couldn't see the million viridian specks.
So they had come to this world. With all our skills, we had not had the time to wrap anyone else in metal. I was all we had. She shed a tear for me, because I could not.
There was no elegance in the return trip. I hurled atoms past myself. I know she must have been uncomfortable, but I am not as omnipotent as I liked to think in those days. I left her at the door just as the sky began to turn an electric red. When it was closed, I turned and leapt off of the sweet warm stone.
I screamed atomic fury through a thousand kilometres of space. A tiny spark from the furnace that nestled next to my hippocampus. I carved a plasma tower through all the soft air of the world. The million scattered before me.
There is no blood or tears in the void to soak me.
And as he sang the world began to fall apart