He was back inside the salamander, Jemima sat on his back, they had been travelling for over three hours. The two neat lines of bots and exoes that had exited the city gates, were now spread loosely over a five kilometre area, all marching toward the same goal.
The silence of the journey made neither traveller uncomfortable, both were lost in their own personal hells. Jemima’s tail hung down and inserted itself into a gap along the salamander’s metal carapace, through this they communicated via thinCast.
“I probably won’t make it through this Kay, I just wanted to let you know I’m alright with that.”
Her brief, almost soliloquy had startled him, both by its suddenness and its contents.
“You mean real death?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you risk such a thing? Why not swap with one of the other Jemimas, one who has a body in the real to go back to?”
“Because that’s not me Kay, this is what I chose for myself; I exist on the Qblock and nowhere else, if I die here that’s it for me, no revival, no second chances, dead.”
“That seems pretty extreme, and if you don’t mind me saying, a little petulant.”
“I don’t mind you saying Kay, I can see why it might look like that to you. Listen, even though I am different from the original Jemima in that I have my own memory and experience, I have my own thoughts, dreams and so on.
However a part of her is still me, and maybe that was one of the reasons she became a d-split in the first place. Maybe it was her way of experiencing death, true death, true loss without a safety net.
Anyway, like I say, I’m fine with it; I don’t want to die, however I have to be with you, I need to know whether you succeed, and if that costs me my life, then so be it.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence, K-Rox found himself thinking about Empires, it struck him that he had never been to a funeral within the game, of course it was possible, people (well, Mai bots) died all the time in Empires, for some reason he’d never gone.
Maybe because it was the typical Empires tourist-list thing to do;
Drive or fly a vehicle with no computer assistance.
Inhabit a body that used only natural defence mechanisms to heal.
Use a computer.
Attend a funeral.
All of these things held little or no fascination, except attending a funeral, he had been interested in the emotion. To Kay he couldn’t imagine how they coped with death, especially the Empires era, they must have known they were tantalisingly close to solving the problem.
By the time Empires comes to it’s end in 2019, the first person not to die in the conventional sense had already been born, but of course nobody at the time knew.
The sky above their head boiled a cauldron of blue, black and grey clouds, they stood at the mouth to a wide valley scarred with the deep gouges of energy weapon fire. A raggedy path of boulders led from where they stood to five kilometres across the valley floor, where the salamander's probes were thinCasting him a view of a dark, foreboding entrance.
As the probes got closer to the entrance, K-Rox detected they were under some kind of viral attack, four of them self-destructed, the other twelve he abandoned as they tried to send him an unrecognised code.
Jemima sent him a simple thinCast message.
“We’re here.”
Previous Chapters
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 53 - Hell Reborn
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 52 - A Chance At Paradise
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 51 - A Time For Death
Asimov's Ghost Summary and Chapter Links 41-50
Asimov's Ghost Summary and Chapter Links 31-40
Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter links 21-30
Original artwork by @fr3eze
Original words by Cryptogee
Altered image by Cg