Words

First Written    Mon Nov 18 09:19:29 2019
File Modified    Wed Feb 14 18:32:26 2024
Latest Upload    Thu Sep 19 03:09:54 2024

November 2019

"You love me now," she whispered.

The sound of her voice was imperfect, filtered through shaken iron - a speaker, and translated from Ti-Ta-Te to binary signals to English. Her tongue, to his, to that of an alien. His electric ears cut through the game of telephone, as did her intuition. Though their voices were not theirs, their words were the opposite.

"Azure, I have always loved you," he replied.

"That's a lie, or an impossibility, or a trick. It's always the latter with you, isn't it, Oxide? What is it this time, the universe didn't exist before you were around to witness it and nothing can convince you otherwise?"

"Yes and no. Yes, from my point of view, the flow of time need not have applied before my senses were here to see it. But no, I could not have loved you before I met you."

Four of Azure's eyes were the root of her namesake. The other two were sea foam green. All six stared into Oxide's face, the pattern of light he chose to represent himself to the world. For Oxide, this was the red Martian soil where his mother had fought hers, sprinkling endlessly like it wasn't a generation's war dumbed down into a screensaver chosen by an infant Mechanical mind.

"So it's not a trick. And it's not an impossibility."

"It's not a lie, either," he continued, "The only lie here is the I, the continuum I."

His face glowed with each syllable, dim red fluorescence making warmth in between the words of a cold mind saying cold things.

"Qualia. I am my perception of the world," she interrupted, "There is no love when you and I are signals, ephemeral-"

"Wrong," Oxide corrected, "Azure, you put a lot of things in me. Fire in my reactor heart. Meaning in my immortal perseverance. But you should know by now you can't put words in my mouth."

"Continue," she permitted.

"Our minds are bubbles in a void. I, and you, am not my perception of the world. The world is nothing but my perception of it. With every bit I witness, the universe in me changes. With every thought I think, I am remade. And when I met you," Oxide paused, his arms lowering to show a moment of relaxation though the hydraulics involved meant the opposite, she knew.

"When I met you, I died. The me without you became a mental coat I could no longer wear. Every year between my birth and my death, now un-relatable. You trapped me in our now, and our now is my always."

Azure's arms hung in the water of her container, a cylindrical tank atop six metal legs that may as well be her body. She waved them back and forth, feigning to grasp nothing while her mind did just the opposite. She didn't want the answer to her question. Her heart felt more than satisfied.

"So you love me now. And you have always loved me. But why won't you love me tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," he repeated, "What makes you think otherwise?"

"Because, maybe you are our now, our always," she replied, "But I am our eternal. And I'm not asking here."

"You're asking on the day you die," he completed.

"No," she corrected, "You will love me on the day I die. I'm asking on the day our always dies. When you have relived our every now a thousand times, and in your universe I have died a thousand times, and you have died twice. And our now is un-relatable."

His heart hummed with electric potentials. Her brain did the same with hypotheticals.

"Azure, when I said the past was a coat I could no longer wear, I didn't say I threw it out. Everything I was became the bedding of my cradle, and in its warmth, the present became me. Though I wear a summer shirt in the heat you bring me, I kept the comfort of my yesterday in a wardrobe box of memories. One day our now will be our history, then our legend, then our myth. But in every life I'll live with you I'll keep another cloth to wear. And when our always dies I'll make a quilt to warm me."

In her water, between walls of glass and steel and futures that might be, she floated. In his universe, he changed his socks while stars died.

"Oxide, my love, let's make as many patchwork moments as we can."