by Lily Markova
“I’ve got you right here, on the hard drive,” said Julius, tapping himself on the temple. “Committed you to memory. Should you get in my way, I’ll be quick and eager to tamper with your source code. Going to miss those tentacles?”
They would have probably stood like that for an unreasonable period of time, competing over whose stare was more intimidating, had it not been for a clatter from the bathroom.
Julius scowled at Whale as he sidestepped him and, having stopped outside the bathroom door, tugged at the knob. “Come on, Joy, I don’t want to experience the ‘human emotion’ glitch twice in the same day.”
The cell phone he was still holding vibrated.
“Plastic screen,” he repeated with satisfaction, and after a brief look at the message, he turned the screen toward Whale. It was a picture of Joy, cropped at the bare shoulders half-covered with a palm leaf. With her eyes narrowed against the sunlight, Joy was looking happy to the point of indecency.
“She’s in India,” said Julius, underwhelmed as ever. “She says, ‘thanks for the teleport’ and ‘is there any way to fix the clothes-losing thing?’ ”
“Oops,” said Whale.
“There’s the door, by the way. You should use it to get lost.” Julius turned away and began to type something rapidly into his phone—which, as Whale apprehended, wasn’t a social media update on how abysmally lame his day had been.
Without Joy, Whale didn’t feel like staying here a minute longer, anyway. “See you,” he said, heading for the exit.
“Please don’t.”
Whale chuckled against his will. He walked over to the elevators, pressed the call button, and looked back at the apartment door. For the first time in his life, he felt as though he was leaving behind a home, even if a very temporary one, a place where his story had begun. This was where he, willingly or not, had started to recognize himself as a young man called Whale, and not merely a cell in the body of the Phaeton. The Phaeton would have never done what Whale had done today for Joy, let alone what he was planning to do with his (slightly disheartening) freedom.
Still, he wanted to explore. He was getting more and more intrigued by his own new nature. He wanted to get to know everything about this Whale: Would he find a mission of his own? A passion? Would he develop little habits and quirks? What would he be thinking about on sleepless nights? What kind of coffee would he drink in the tired mornings, what kind of music would make his heart yearn? Whale wanted to see how he would learn and transform, little by little, day after day, and what he would do with his ability to change ordinary lives.
The elevator dinged and opened its embrace for Whale. He entered and reached slowly for the first-floor button, hesitating for a heartbeat as his eyes fell upon the little “I” engraved next to it.
As solid and safe as “we” could feel, it could also at times be enchaining, and like an anchor, heavy, and perhaps, “I” didn’t always have to be little or scrawny; sometimes, it was standing tall and straight.
As the elevator’s doors were sliding closed, Whale was staring in front of him, and despite the lungeyeart-constricting grief he felt for his mutilated family, despite the guilt and sorrow he felt at the thought of magnificent, beautiful ordinary people and their lonely broken cities, despite his fear of his own unknown future, he was smiling.
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