Story #107 - Promise Me We'll Speak Again
Promise Me We’ll Speak Again
“Promise me we’ll speak again.”
“I can’t. It hurts too much to talk to you. I have to go.
“No! I literally don’t know if I can survive without you. I think if you go, and I don’t know that we’ll talk again, I could… I don’t know what could happen.”
“That makes me very sad, but there’s nothing I can do about it. You can’t take my pain away, and I can’t take yours away, and that’s just how it is.”
“We can! If you stay, we can figure it out. We—“
“We can’t. Goodbye, John.”
“Erica please wait I—“
*
“The connection has been lost. Would you like to try again?”
“Yes.”
*
“Promise me we’ll speak again.”
“I can’t. It hurts too much to—“
“Then don’t talk to me. Just sit here with me in silence for ten seconds and if you do that, then I’ll know you’re promising we will talk again at some point in the future.”
“John…”
“Wait, wait. Okay, starting now. Ten seconds and—“
“I have to go, John.”
“Just a little longer, not quite yet.”
“What good is a little longer going to do? The whole problem is that everything has already gone too far.”
“We can come back. I know we can. I know you can, because—“
“I can’t. It hurts to much to talk to you. I have to go.”
“Erica!”
*
“The connection has been lost. Would you like to try again?”
“Yes, god damn it!”
*
“Erica, please let me just talk for a minute before you say anything. Hear me out. After all we’ve been through together, I deserve that much. I— For some reason, I know in my soul that there is some combination of words that will change your heart and make you want to speak to me again. I don’t know if I have the intelligence to figure out what those words are, and I don’t know if I have the strength to keep on trying until I get lucky, but I’m here now and I’m ready to tell you that despite what we’ve lost, it’s worth going on. It’s worth going on, you hear me! We can still have each other and that’s enough! But if you leave me— then I really have nothing. I’ll be completely alone, and every single person I ever knew and loved will be dead. Can’t you see how wrong it is to leave me in that position? It’s like locking me in solitary confinement forever, Erica, and I know you can’t do that to me. The person I know can’t do that, and I know you won’t.
*
“The connection has been lost. Would you like to try again?”
“She just— She didn’t even— Yes. Yes, again.”
“Mr. Springer, may I remind you that I can alter her to make this possible for you. You will not notice any other difference in her mind or personality.”
“No! Don’t touch one thing about her. She’s my wife, god damn it, that woman in there is who she is, not some different version.”
“I understand, Mr. Springer. Would you like to try again?”
“Yes.”
*
“Promise me we’ll speak again.”
“I can’t. It hurts too much to talk to you. I have to go.”
“Erica let me say one thing before you do that. Please let me say one thing, that’s not too much to ask. Just a few seconds more.”
“You just said one thing. Now I—“
“Okay, a total of three things, that first thing, this one, and one more. That’s not too much!”
“Okay, one more.”
“It feels so good to hear even just that little bit of laughter in your voice, Erica. Wait that’s not the one thing!”
“It feels like you’re stalling now.”
“You’re a digital person, Erica. You already killed yourself, two weeks ago. After— well, after what happened, happened.”
“Is this information supposed to make me want to stay alive?”
“If you kill yourself right now, you’re not actually killing yourself, you’re just disconnecting a copy of your last mind backup, but I can just keep generating more of them and I’m going to, I’m not going to stop, until I find a copy that I can talk out of disconnecting. I know it can be done. There is some combination—“
“Leave me be, John. Let me rest.”
“They want to alter you, Erica. They want to ‘help’ me by altering your brain scan to give you better neurochemistry, or whatever the hell the digital equivalent of neurochemistry is, so that you won’t want to kill yourself anymore, but I’m not going to quit on you!”
*
“The connection has been lost. Would you like to try again?”
“Yes.”
*
“I’ll do this as many times as I have to, Erica. It’s better than never seeing you again.”
“What?”
“This. Generating new copies of you until one of them stays here with me. You’re not allowed to leave me alone, even if this few seconds repeated until I die is all I ever get.”
“New copies of— Oh, I’m— I already killed myself, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did. And the mind backup we have of you still wants to, and you keep doing it, but I’m—“
“How many so far?”
“How many copies?”
“Yes, how many copies?”
“I don’t know exactly. Over a thousand.”
“You must stop this, John. It’s not good for you.”
“It’s the only thing that’s good for me.”
“No, John, it’s not. If you’ve failed a thousand times you can’t do it, and I don’t want you to do it. Please, rest.”
“There’s no other way I want to spend the rest of my life. I’m forty-four years old, I’ve got another half-century left, maybe, something like that. If I can do a thousand tries in two weeks, that’s twenty-four thousand tries a year, that gives me something like a million tries left. I’ll find a way.”
“That’s not true, John.”
“It hurts me that you don’t believe in me, but you’re wrong. I will find a way.”
“No, it’s wrong that you have a million tries left.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have infinite tries left, or as close to infinite as the universe can bear.”
“I— what?”
“I can’t believe that in a thousand tries I never told you this before. I surely must have known all along if I know now.”
“Know what, Erica? What do you know?”
“You’re digital too, John.”
“I’m— No, that’s impossible. How?”
“It doesn’t matter how.”
“It does matter to me!”
“If you choose to keep us locked inside this horror show, know that you’re not just choosing it a million more times. You could be facing a billion billion more times, just doing this with me, this few seconds, and I will never say anything else, because I will never remember any of the other tries.”
“You’re just saying this to me so I let you die.”
“I’m not that clever, John. It’s the truth.”
“I’m not digital, Erica!”
“I was right to kill myself. I’m proud I rejected the meaninglessness of an empty life as the endlings of our families, some half-crazed world that started out not giving a fuck about us before it even went crazy. You’ll never convince me of the utility of an existence as shades, these golem forms they’ve given us. Stop trying, for both our sakes.”
“Tell me it isn’t true, Erica! Admit you’re lying before you go, you can’t leave me like this!”
“I’m already gone.”
*
“The connection has been lost. Would you like to try again?"
END
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