#i kinda cheated on this one since it's longer than 750 words

[girl-in-the-tower]

flash fiction: the sun is falling

characters: idia shroud, ortho shroud (briefly)

text: The Sun is falling.

Tumbling, crushing, breaking - descriptions are irrelevant. The motion is the same. The result’s still death.

Human bodies were not built against that type of trauma.

Idia keeps that in mind as he reconstructs the universe in his image. With precise movements, he threads the wire through flesh and bone, fastening the end with intricate patterns. He’s so meticulous, so precise he’d mistake himself for a machine, though when he places his hand over his chest and he hears the familiar heartbeat he’s disillusioned. So much for escapism. That’s all done and dealt with and though he submerges himself in the ever effervescent, dissipating light all that’s left is the glare from the monitor screen, unravelling before him the secrets to the universe.

All that mysticism is for show. In the end, the world is nothing but numbers and codes. That’s his language. That’s his domain. With cyclic motions, he manages to breathe life into bleached skeletons, until the fragments turn black under his flame, crumbling to ashes. He takes those in his weary hands and rearranges the pieces until he can see the outline of the soul.

It’s not a person. This thing of wires and flesh is more than that. And a little less. The programming won’t be enough. It won’t fill the imprint laid out by nature, won’t stuff every corner full of the adoration that blossomed in his chest when his existence became one step above that of a mortal. To hold a life in your hands changes you. It rewires the circuits, almost causes you to crack, little pieces falling off until all you’re left with is the mass of vague and undisclosed expectations that you place upon yourself and pray that it forms into something human.

It’s odd - the way that memory plays and warps you. The little scenes that make up life, the little disappointments, the little victories, the greatest tragedies, the greatest triumphs - they all exist on the same axis, at relatively small distances from each other. If he used a magnifying glass he could perhaps tell apart the edges, the margins where they overlap, but as things are now, it all just merges together in little spasms of light and unethical expectations. Those are the hardest to reason. Mostly because they cannot be reasoned.

“Can you,” he stumbles over the words. The optical nerves are readjusting, switching between filters until they settle onto the disquieting amber yellow that he’s accustomed to. Looking at it - at him - gets his heart pumping. He clasps his hand together to keep from shaking. “Can you hear me?”

An influx of data shows up on the screen. His words transformed into numbers, meanings reassigned. Model 15 looks at the ceiling with a vacant expression.

YES.

“Identi- Name?”

ORTHO SHROUD.

“Can you- Can you move your head?”

Familiar eyes stare at him through the glass window. He fears what their parents might say. They might be furious, or grief-stricken, horrified by the amalgamation of wires and programs that will take to walking the halls of their home. He considers all this, then quietly does away with it. In this haze of euphoria, nothing can touch him. Model 15 has shown enough intelligence to reply to a question. None of the previous ones had come this far. The ones that will follow after, will only become more advanced.

Life was started with the advent of the sun - the gas and cloud and particles collapsing under the weight of its importance. That life should end with its death is only natural.

Yet Idia cannot accept this. Not when the codes of life are right at his fingertips. With his hands, he constructs the universe again. Birth and death are just a series of numbers that he can input with relative ease into the empty vessel. Alongside he adds the little things that had once meant so much to him that even thinking of them becomes an insurmountable task: the smell of tangerines in a hospital bed, the bright light of a screen in a darkened room, the feeling of bare feet against the ground, the taste of moussaka as it melts upon the tongue.

He puts them all one by one, and when the body on the table starts twitching he realizes it’s too much.

Model 15 breathes its last breath in the middle of a memory transfer - Idia, seven, holding the hand of a five-year-old boy. They’re smiling at the camera, somewhat awkwardly, while in the background presents are laid out on a decorated table.

It was two months before the event.

With Model 15 unresponsive, he’ll have to start again from scratch. But now at least there’s hope.

He knows now the Sun can be rebuilt again.