I, Cassandra

77 | CASSANDRA VALLIS

Miro is exactly the same, only she doesn't need food, and she can't die, just like Ryan. Every night she curls up beside me and purrs with contentment, her body warm and soft. She's a marvel and it's hard for me to believe she was inside a metal sphere that waited ten thousand years for me to press my thumb into the reader for sixty seconds. I thought the sphere was Miro, that I would have a robot cat companion but I was wrong. The sphere was her container, what kept her 'alive' until she could be activated. Inside its shell, I found a young cat, curled up tight into a ball, so alike to my Miro that I wept as she opened her eyes, stepped into my lap and licked away my tears.

She bounds ahead of us up a rocky ridge, intelligent, alert and happy, chasing insects, and living the life I always dreamed of Miro having. I know she's not really Miro, just like Ryan isn't really Ryan, but I sense there is something in her of my Miro. I don't ask Ryan if he thinks de Pommier copied Miro's consciousness into this one, like she did to him because the line between what's real and what's a substitute for organic life that's also real makes me uneasy, as if I am somehow inferior. I just let it be and am grateful.

Every night Ryan makes love to me, holds me, cherishes me, and now that I have Miro, I am complete. What was once a nightmare has become a dream. I am free. No more Jackpot. No more Alpha VII. No more visions of what's to come. Just this. Peace.

'We're almost there,' Ryan says as we approach the top of the ridge. He gives me a little smile of encouragement as I clamber up after him. After five weeks of slogging through humid marshes, vine-infested plains, and navigating rocky moraines I am more than ready to stop.

He helps me over the top and in the distance, I see it, tucked into a deep valley: A city, or what's left of it.

'Alpha VI,' he says as I shade my eyes from the glare of the sun. Under a remaining piece of its dome, a section of the city still stands intact. I almost can't process it, the solidness of it, the once-mastery of a world that now masters us.

'How is it possible it survived?' I ask. 'I saw everything burn.' It's like a shrine to our past. A world I believed long lost. No more sleeping rough. A building to shelter in when it rains and to escape the glaring heat of the summer sun. It brings me a kind of joy I can't even express.

Miro is already racing away to it. I call after her, but she ignores me, as if something within the city calls to her.

I catch Ryan watching me. He pulls something from his chest pocket. A small box. I'd asked him about it before but was told it wasn't the time. I sense now is the time.

He holds it out to me. 'This is for you.'

I take it and open it. Inside, a row of tiny vials I immediately recognise, from when things were so different. From when I was someone else. I close the box.

'And now what?' I ask. I know what the contents of the vials can do. What they allow me to do.

'And now you have a choice,' he says. 'And whatever you choose, I will accept.' He turns to me. 'I know what those can do, I read about what's in them from de Pommier's files.'

I wait. He clears his throat. Looks over my shoulder into the distance. Whatever he is going to ask me to choose is going to be something that will define us from this point on. It hits me he didn't bring me here to live but to show me this place. To show me what I couldn't have imagined without seeing it.

'Blue.' His eyes come to mine. 'I won't cease to exist for billions of years.'

'I know,' I say. 'You told me.'

He looks at me with the weight of another future—his future.

'And you will be alone,' I whisper.

He says nothing, though the muscles in his jaw flinch.

'You could be like me,' he says, quiet. 'Like Miro.'

And there it is, the choice. Spend what's left of my fragile life here with him, and use what's in the vials to access the part of me that can terraform a world and make this a more hospitable place for us to live. A place where I will grow old and die in his arms, in an embrace that won't ever age. I have maybe fifty years left if I am lucky, and most of that will be as an old woman.

Or, I can give up my life and be remade like Ryan.

'How?' I ask.

He tilts his head towards the city, at the part that still stands. 'She's not who we thought she was.'

I know who he means. Miro returns. Meows up at me just like my Miro did when she wanted something. Rubs her body against my leg. She turns back to the city, runs ahead, then back a little. I know what she wants. She wants to go to the one who gave her a second chance.

And I know what I want. I want a second chance, too. I want Ryan. I don't want to leave him alone for a near eternity. I don't want to die in his arms.

I hand the box of vials back to him. He tucks it into his pocket. Holds out his hand to me. Together we follow Miro into Alpha VI, to the one I know is waiting for me. And as I look up at Ryan, at the one who exists in a body that cannot die, I realise I am not afraid.

I am happy.

❃ THE END ❃

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