They had said goodbye a long time ago.
Hearing her voice over the soft static, Azo felt the immensity of the world between them.
Distance and the past can both be measured in hours.
To move through the earth and stand in the same room, to be visible to each other, it would be a handful. He could already feel the wheel's grip in his hands. The night drive, catching radio stations at a low volume just above the engine's hum, flying over empty two lane asphalt.
To reach through and touch the last moment they were in each other's lives, it was hundreds of thousands. Six full digits of events that could never be summed up. He felt it when the connection clicked into place, and again in the age of his own voice as he spoke,
hello.
He felt the same clouded awe as anyone whose mind has ever attempted to trace the walls of humanity's shared hourglass.
*
They were set to be married. It was before the war, in a quieter world.
His eyes were still the color he had been born with, then. She talked about them from time to time, in the soft, early sunlight. The same color as those of a childhood friend, giving two sets of happy memories that looking into them could call upon. Their ears to one another's chests, in turn hearing each other's heartbeats and the gentle biology of an animal half awake. Nothing more audible within them.
Far away, a lone robin would sing to the empty trees.
In the space of a single breath, he feels himself walk from that memory to this one. He feels every day of the in between.
He wonders if she still remembers what that's like, to breathe. Or if the long eclipse took that from her, too.
it's... been a while.
"It has. And I'm sorry, but I don't have much time now, either."
*
The clouds visible through the transparent floor of the restaurant look like the kind you could fall into and be held forever in, blissfully ignorant of the layers of city below them. Only small stretches of ocean are visible beyond the far edges, through the walls. In one direction, you could just barely make out the curve of the earth. The others are obscured by art deco interior, trios of gold parallel lines running everywhere that isn't already being occupied by white marble or mirrors.
Azo didn't want to answer the call. The selective availability algorithm had failed and the connection had already been made. It was in the logs and once things have gone that far, the data is registered and the tidal wave it portends will be coming for him, too. Touched means part of and at that point, you simply need as much information as you can get. If it goes so far as being a call in the first place, answering is his only option.
This is why he stays offline.
Sophia said four things that couldn't be immediately understood: helica, phase rotation, titan, and ghost. He knows what they all might mean. He doesn't know what any of them do mean.
He does know what the short term future will entail. He will be on a flight tomorrow morning and he will need help navigating a jungle. He will find a data key in the remains of a shipwreck that has been forgotten and shouldn't be subnet connected, but is. He will hike for two more days and enter the remains of a hollow mountain.
In the long term, he wonders if he may need to undergo another bodily reset. He exhales heavily at the thought, cascading ripples across the coffee in front of him.
Their conversation, as with every other that he has, was read directly into appended storage. It will sit there, in an encrypted bank within his upper spinal column, until such time as he can mark it resolved and return to his former status of full irrelevance. He will not be online until then.
If, after all, you are going to weave tangled webs, try to weave as few as possible.
Though, when information is your business, there are no isolated points. Not until the work is finished. And the start of that is still nearly a day away.
In the meantime, he sits in a corner with no one at his back, sets his thoughts to the beginning, and turns everything over once more in his mind.
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