[Day 13 — Begin.]

[The higher beings have noted Day 12.]

[God of Thunder has not sent a super chat.]

[Goddess of Love has not sent a super chat.]

[Nobody has sent a super chat.]

[The higher beings are quiet today.]

[Begin.]

I stood in the sand.

The worm was already circling.

I looked at the horizon.

I started walking.

[Day 11 — Begin.]

[Mission change.]

[The sandworm has been retired from today’s entertainment program.]

[New objective: Survive in the desert for two days.]

[Details: The desert has an edge. It is reachable on foot. The distance is not provided.]

[Supplies: None.]

[Water: None.]

[Skills: Still blocked.]

[Begin.]

Hour one the thirst was background.

Hour three it was the only thing in the foreground.

Hour five it had become structural. Not a sensation anymore. A filter. Everything coming through it changed.

I kept walking.

The desert was flat enough that you could see a long way and what you saw was more desert, consistent in every direction,

Hour seven.

My mouth had stopped producing saliva around hour five and the absence had become its own specific problem.

The inside of my mouth felt like cloth left in the sun, something that had once been one thing and had become another through sustained exposure to heat and the removal of everything wet.

My lips cracked. The cracks opened when I moved my mouth and I stopped moving my mouth.

Hour nine.

Each step required a separate instruction from some part of me that was still operational. The automatic walking function had moved from background to foreground and the foreground was very crowded.

Hour eleven.

I went down.

The legs made the decision and the rest of me arrived in the sand without having been consulted. I got my hands out in time. I stayed on my hands and knees in the sand for a while.

I got up.

Walked.

Hour fourteen.

The walking was something I was observing. The body doing it. Me watching.

Hour sixteen.

The body stopped.

Not a rest. The accounting came up short and the body implemented the result.

I was in the sand.

The sun was in its wrong position.

My throat had closed to narrow and dry and each breath moved through it with friction.

I lay down.

The sky was above me and the sun moved across it slowly and I watched it move until my eyes stopped cooperating and then I watched nothing.

[Day 11 — Death — 16 hours. Cause: Dehydration.]

***

[Day 12 — Begin]

[Objective: Survive two days. Day 1 of 2.]

[The desert mirage effect has been enabled.]

[Standard desert psychology.]

[Water: No.]

[Begin.]

Hour one.

Walking.

The thirst was present from the first step. It had stopped needing to build.

Hour three.

The mirage arrived without ceremony.

Water on the horizon. The quality of light off a flat wet surface, moving slightly, completely convincing. I knew what a mirage was. The body knew what water looked like and did not care what I knew.

I kept walking in my direction.

The water stayed on the horizon.

Hour four.

It had moved closer because I had moved toward it.

I corrected my direction. The water appeared in the new direction immediately.

I stopped.

"No," I said, to the horizon.

Walked in a third direction.

Water there too.

The desert was not insisting. The mirage simply occupied the horizon in whatever direction I was walking, patient and unobtrusive, because the body was going to do the insisting for it and the mirage knew this and could wait.

Hour six.

The estate gate. To my left, standing in the sand, exactly as it looked from the road. I walked past it and it dissolved when I was close enough that the stone should have had individual texture.

Hour seven.

The training ground. I walked through it.

Hour eight.

The thirst at hour eight was no longer a sensation. It was a condition. My vision had a quality to it, a slight unreality at the edges, the world not quite committing to being solid.

Hour nine.

Rin.

Standing in the sand.

The hospital clothes. The specific ones. I had memorized them across ten years of sitting in the same room and the desert had found them in me and built them accurately, down to the way the sleeve fell across her wrist.

"Rin,"

She was standing upright.

Looking in my direction.

I stopped walking.

The mirage did not dissolve,

All the others had dissolved when I approached. This one stood in the sand with the patience of someone who was not in a hurry because it knew I was going to come to it.

I walked toward it.

Close enough to touch.

It dissolved.

Sand.

My hand was open in the air where her arm had been.

I stood there.

The sun was still moving.

I did not move for a long time.

Then I walked.

My father.

Standing in the desert in the clothes he had been wearing the morning of the accident, which I also knew the details of because the body remembered things the mind tried not to.

I did not stop walking.

I walked through him.

Hour twelve.

My mother.

I walked through her too.

Hour thirteen.

The hospital room. The chair. The sound of machines. Rin in the bed with her eyes closed and the particular stillness of someone who had been still for ten years.

This one did not dissolve.

The smell.

Hospital rooms had a smell that was not cleanness exactly but the specific result of sustained clinical maintenance, and the desert had found that too, somewhere in me, and deployed it.

I sat in the chair because the chair was there.

She was in the bed.

I put my hand over hers.

It felt real.

I knew it was not real.

It felt real.

"I am trying," I said. To the mirage.

"I came every day. Ten years. You know that." My voice came out rough from the dryness and the roughness made it sound different.

"I just need you to know I am still trying."

My voice stopped.

I looked at her.

"I am so tired," I said. "I am so tired of this sand and the sky and dying and coming back and dying again and I am tired of—"

I stopped.

"I just wanted," I said. "I wanted—"

The words stopped organizing.

I sat in the chair that was not a chair and held a hand that was not a hand.

"All I wanted was to live. To come home. To find a way back and to be with you." My voice had gone somewhere I did not recognize.

"I just wanted to be here," I said. "When you woke up. That was all I wanted. To be in the room when you woke up. That was the whole thing."

"Kill me," I said.

The machines kept running.

"Just kill me," I said. "Just end it."

The mirage Rin opened her eyes.

Her eyes were the right color. The exact right color. The specific shade of dark that I had not seen in ten years because her eyes had been closed for ten years.

She looked at me.

"Ren," she said.

Not Kael. Ren. The real name, from before.

"I am here," I said. "I am right here—"

"I know," she said.

The room dissolved.

My hand was in the sand.

I was sitting in the sand where the chair had been.

Hour fourteen

I sat there for a while.

Then I lay down in the sand.

The thirst had passed through the stage of being painful and come out the other side into something quiet and absolute. My vision had narrowed to a corridor.

The sky above me was the wrong color and the sun was in its wrong position and I watched it without moving.

The breathing had developed a sound.

Each inhale caught on something dry in my throat and the catch produced a small sound and the sound produced a sensation and the sensation produced nothing useful.

I didn’t know what hour it was anymore. But I was still there.

Still in the sand.

The sun had moved.

I turned my head to the side. The sand was hot against my cheek. I closed my eyes.

"Kill me," I said, to the sky.

The sky said nothing.

"Just kill me," I said.

Still nothing.

"Please," I said.

The worm surfaced.

I did not move.

[Day 12 — Death — 14 hours.]

[The observation deck is quiet today.]

[Day 13 — Begin]

I stood in the sand.

"Fuck off,"

The worm’s ripple was already moving to the east.

I looked at the horizon.

I started walking.

****

[ New System synchronization Begins... ]