Chapter Eight
FENN
I would yell, but it wouldn’t help me.
The contract is very clear. We signed on to deliver a certain amount of information. We were trained to gather it, trained so I could reprogram my drones for measuring chemicals instead of stealing them. It was all doable. They said we’d have plenty of time, but now I’m remembering there were no allowances for “natural disasters,” as in, the ship dying faster. I remember Doran, in a hologram, telling us that it could all likely be gathered within two weeks, though we would probably have more like six, possibly longer.
Now we have exactly two. There is no more wiggle room. One less day. If we don’t deliver, we will all have died for nothing, and Callandra will not receive the death benefit. The money for physical therapy. The neural implants so her spinal cord will function better.
When we all start to leave the mess hall, instead of screaming, I tap out on my leg nervously.
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This sucks. This sucks. This sucks.
We are all somber, standing there, when Hana says, “I can help you.” Her eyes are glassy, and her voice quavers.
“What?” Miki says. She looks like she’s smelled something rotten. I’m suspicious, too.
“Help how?” I ask.
“Well, I know Cyclo,” she says. She wipes her tears away with a sleeve before they can fall down her cheeks, and a little kindling of anger appears, replacing the sadness. “I can try to find ways to save her.”
Gammand shakes his head, and Miki’s the one who says what we’re all thinking. “There’s no saving the ship, Hana.”
She gives us all a hard look. “How do you know?”
We’ve had months of training for the inevitability of Cyclo’s collapse. It’s beyond truth for all of us now.
Miki says, “I can show you the data, Hana, but we don’t have time. The numbers don’t lie. The ship is rapidly dying.”
Portia holds her hands up because Miki is starting to sound pissed. “Wait. Hana, how well do you know the ship?”
“I’ve been studying her all my life. I had little else to do besides study.”
“Can you tell us about her cellular respiration cycle? The three kinds?” Portia asks. Her lip twitches. She’s baiting her.
Hana narrows her eyes. “Not three, two kinds. Nitrogen based and oxygen based. But yes, I can.” She pauses. “How could you possibly know that she’s going to die if you don’t even know how many respiration cycles she has?” Hana looks angry, as if Portia has somehow insulted Cyclo.
Portia looks impressed. “And what about her cadmium degradation—”
“Until about a year ago, it was doing fine, but I think they made a mistake by adding the carbonaceous chelator.” Hana crosses her arms. “That one degrades too fast. Cyclo functions much better with the other biologic filters, the ones that run on the red algae residues.”
We all stare at her blankly. This girl knows her stuff. A few months ago, I’d have no idea what she was talking about. Even now, I barely do. I’m just a miner, really. I tell my drones to fetch, and they bring stuff back.
In the ensuing silence, she says, “May I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” Portia says.
“Did you bring any phosphorous binders? They help bind the calcium buildup that slows her neural networks, but we were running low last time I asked Mother. There are some things that could help. Have you considered reverse engineering her stem cells? It worked on smaller bioships. What about evaluating some of her toxins and asking—what’s the company’s name? ReCOR—to send in supplemental energy sources until she can regenerate?”
“We didn’t…we can’t…”
Miki answers for Portia. “Like we said, we’re here to collect data, run a few tests, but our mission is not to save what can’t be saved.”
Hana looks like she’s been bitten. “ReCOR has no imagination, then.”
“We are expressly not allowed to interfere with Cyclo’s demise. It’s in our contract,” I finally say. “Hana. We can’t.”
“Or what? You survive and Cyclo survives?” Hana says, exasperated. “Why is that bad? Why can’t I try to live?”
“Because this is not about you!” Gammand roars.
We all go silent in stunned shock. Gammand never raises his voice. A blood vessel sticks out of his neck, and his eyes have gone red-rimmed. Thankfully, he doesn’t have his tranquilizer gun in his thigh holster. He might shoot Hana straight between the eyes if he could.
Portia puts a hand up and turns to Gammand. “It’s all right, Gammand. It’s all right.”
Shockingly, he turns and walks away. Of all of us, Portia has been the only person who’s been able to talk to Gammand these last few months.
“Yes, Hana. You can help us,” Portia says. “Look, she knows the ship better than any of us. She can help. And if it’s not us trying to save the ship, we won’t ruin our contracts.” She thinks for a second. “At least, I hope not.”
Miki shrugs. “In any case, we have to sleep. Living quarters are dispersed throughout the beta ring. Take your pick. We’ll meet back here at oh six hundred for breakfast and get to work. Shifts will be staggered from here on out.”
Despite the notion that we have a whole ship to wander around for privacy, we all stick together. After all those months on the Selkirk, and with the shrinking amount of time left, no one seems to want to be too alone anymore. Hana trails behind me like a shadow.
As Portia passes by us with her long legs, Hana asks in a quiet voice, “Is it true that Prinniads scream in their sleep?” She looks so impossibly sad asking the question.
Portia turns her red eyes on her. “It is true. We scream.”
Gammand yawns as he walks nearby. He’s cooled off considerably since a few minutes ago. “They’re also known to be violent, so let that be a warning. She’s not legally responsible for what she does when she’s unconscious.” He rubs his arm as if he’d been recently punched there.
Portia smiles her toothless smile. “Next time, a little more space is advised.” She pats his sore arm, and he grunts and nods.
I think we’d all appreciate an accidental punch instead of being lonely. I like Gammand’s quiet, though he’s clearly hiding a rage machine behind those enormous hours of wordlessness. And Portia, as smart and snappy as she is, doles out more smiles than any of us. Despite her lack of teeth, they are appreciated. Miki? She seems alternately placid, like a grazing elephant, or silently pissed off. We’ve bickered plenty, but I also catch her crying when no one is looking, silently shaking when she thinks we’re all sleeping, so I cut her all the slack I can.
If not for the trip to get here, I might hate them all—I’ve always found reasons to dislike anyone around me. I don’t like spending too much time with anybody, I guess for fear I’ll get attached. Look at what happened with my family. They all probably despise me for not being the perfect brother/son/pilot they always wanted, and they know me best. So nine months on the Selkirk with these guys was a trial at first, but they all see through my sarcasm now. We know each other well enough to know there’s no time to waste on hate anymore.
After some more walking, Hana says, even quieter, “I don’t scream in my sleep. But I might now.”
Man. We’ve known for a while that we were on a death mission, but I can’t imagine what it’s like for Hana—coming out of her hidden room to find that she’s going to die, and then even sooner than expected. Her body seems to drag as she walks along, her eyes big and empty.
I don’t respond. It’s been quite a day, and I’m exhausted. We just found out we have one week less to live, and it’s weighing on everyone. Hana walks ahead of me, out of earshot. My holo visor buzzes on my forehead, and I blink it open. Doran appears. He’s appeared on Miki’s holo, too.
“I want one of you to stay with Hana,” Doran says, sounding more distant than usual. He’s looking strangely pixelated. “We’ll need to get info on her, too, whether we like it or not. All living organisms on the ship are a source of data and must be included.”
“What? That just increased our work. You know we only have two weeks now! There’s nothing in our contract for that kind of change!” Miki complains.
“No, there isn’t,” Doran says, “but the contract is clear. All life forms. That was supposed to be only us, and any indigenous bacterial flora. But whether we like it or not, the terms are the same.”
“Can we at least try to ask for a bonus?” I ask.
“Can’t hurt to try, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
What if I could earn more for Callandra, and for my parents? That’s classic Callandra, actually—going above and beyond to perform at her utmost excellence. My sister always looked for ways to improve the odds. Me, I always looked for more ways to break the rules. My conscience nudges me, and I speak up.
“I volunteer to keep an eye on the girl tonight,” I say.
Doran’s holographic face nods. “Fine. We’ll rotate from here on out. Why don’t you send a nanobot into her while she sleeps? If I had another humanoid biomonitor, I’d use it, but they only gave us four. It may be helpful to have data and samples right off the bat.”
“Sure thing,” I say.
“And another thing,” Doran says. He opens his mouth, then his image disappears completely in a cloud of disorganized pixels.
I call to him. Miki looks at me.
“What happened?” I ask. “Why did he cut out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he had to talk to another crew.”
Doran is one person on a space terminal at the center point of several ReCOR missions. A single humanoid, in charge of about four different trips. Doran is our only intermediary communication with everyone in the nearby galaxies.
“Gammand?” Miki calls. He circles back. Being the data storage guy, he’s also the best at communications. She explains what happened. Gammand tries to call up Doran on his visor, but it doesn’t work.
“I’ll check first thing tomorrow, but Doran warned us that this might occur. Some of the radiation flares from the star clusters nearby might interfere with our communication. But our work doesn’t change. Time for sleep.” A curve of crew quarters comes up, and Portia takes one room, next to Miki, next to Gammand. The doors pinch closed behind them, and I run to catch up with Hana.
“Hey,” I say, but she keeps walking. “Hey!” She keeps going. “Hana! Stop for a second, will you?”
She stops and turns to me, wonderingly. Her eyes are still sad and red rimmed. “Is that what you meant when you said ‘Hey’?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Then why didn’t you just say ‘stop’?”
Oh my God, this girl is going to make my brain turn to jelly. “I don’t know. Look, I’m assigned to stay with you tonight.”
“Why?”
“To, uh, watch you.” Okay, I think I just earned the award for Most Creepy Guy in This Galaxy.
“That’s unnecessary. Cyclo watches me.” She adds, “I’ll be fine,” though she doesn’t sound convincing. She looks lonely. Like I probably do, but don’t want to admit.
“Doran says I must.”
She nods but then stops. “Well…what if I say no?”
“Well, we signed this contract with this company called ReCOR, see, and we have to—”
“I signed no such contract.”
She’s right. In fact, there’s nothing to prevent her from wreaking havoc on each and every part of this mission. And then what?
Then I won’t be able to do my job, and ReCOR won’t give my family the payout. I’ll be a failure in my family’s eyes, yet again. This girl, this tiny scrap of an organism, has the capability to destroy everything I’ve tried to make right. I start talking before I even have a plan.
“I know a story,” I say.
She crinkles her eyes. “Excuse me?”
“About a girl. A girl with brown hair and golden eyes.” I touch my pendant, and her eyes fall to the shining metal in my hand. “She left me a message on this, actually.”
I pause there. Hana’s lower lip has dropped, and she cocks her head slightly, waiting. She plays with the pearl around her neck, and her other hand goes to her eyes, wiping them where they had started watering again. I go on.
“She always smells like caramel—it’s her favorite candy, and she even knows how to make it from scratch. For her twelfth birthday, her parents bought her a pair of wings.”
I can even see them, in my mind’s eye. Pearlescent green and blue wings, small and crumpled on Callandra’s pale skin. As the biosynthetic implant began to grow a vascular system of its own, the wings began to expand and grow. I can still see them fluttering feebly, their first attempt at flying. Like most cheap biosynthetic attachments, they withered off after a few months.
Hana’s eyes grow wide, and the sadness drops away. I can see for the first time that her eyes are dilating a touch, deeply black within the brown. She’s thinking hard. “What happened?” she asks. “Could she fly? What does the message on your pendant say?” She steps up to me, and we’re so close that I can see my reflection in her eyes. Her eyelashes are dark and straight, and I have the weird urge to reach out and touch that ice-cream hair of hers. Man, she’s pretty.
Fenn, stop that, I think.
“I haven’t listened to it yet. But maybe I can tell you more about her tonight. I need a place to sleep,” I say.
“Only Mother sleeps in my quarters,” she says, defensively.
I nod. “Sure. I don’t want to cause any trouble. It’ll ruin my contract. Maybe I’ll tell you the rest of the story another time.”
“No, wait.” She puts out a hand and grabs mine. Her skin is cool and soft. “Oh.” She stares at my hand, still in hers.
“What?”
“Oh. I’ve never held another person’s hand before that wasn’t my mother’s.” She doesn’t let go, and I’m actually really glad she doesn’t. “You can stay. Only this time, I guess.”
“Okay.”
She doesn’t let go of my hand as she leads me down the corridor. She’s holding my hand funny, the way that someone puts their hand over yours, instead of under.
“Here, this is how you do it,” I say, moving our hands so they fit better. Internally, I’m thinking This is absurd, don’t hold her hand, don’t get attached, but it’s just hands, it doesn’t mean anything. But I really like this. I’ve never held a girl’s hand before, if you don’t count Callandra, but damn, I kind of sort of like this. I want to yell at myself.
Stop it, Fenn.
There are flashes of green light along the corridor floor, going left and right, showing the way to northeast alpha.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“Oh. Cyclo is showing you the way forward, even though I already know. She’s being polite.”
“Hey. Can you take us through the core of this thing on the way?” I ask.
She stops and lets go, and I hide any disappointment at not having her soft hand in mine. “The gamma ring? I suppose so. I know how to get there, though I’ve never been myself.” The floors and walls flash white streaks. She turns to frown at me. “Cyclo says it isn’t safe. We’d better not.”
Eventually, we’ll have to go there, but I don’t tell her. Instead, she grabs my hand again, and we keep walking. This time, she says, “Can I try this? I always wanted to see what it felt like.” She intertwines her fingers with mine, and I suppress a shiver. If I’m not careful, a huge grin might take over my face, so I concentrate on walking. Hana seems to have decided that I will become untethered and loose, forever lost, if she doesn’t clamp on to my hand, so okay.
We travel counterclockwise within the Calathus for another ten minutes. The walls and floor aren’t always a uniform blue, with the light streaks leading the way. I see yellow patches and brown spots oozing some corrosive liquid, leaving what looks like chemical burns on the walls. I don’t turn on my holofeed to find out what the data scanners say about them, but they make me worry.
You’d think that someone who was going to die soon wouldn’t worry so much, but it’s not true. Every minute becomes a little more precious than the last, particularly when I have work I have to accomplish on a limited timeline. So I’m careful to not step on or touch any of the spots. I can investigate them tomorrow.
Finally, we reach her room, where she had changed before. A blue door flashes brighter blue, before disintegrating its membrane into nothingness.
“Here we are.” She finally lets go of my hand. It feels rather empty now, and I hold it in my other hand, as if it’s injured. Hana motions for me to enter and turns around to face me, almost like a dance partner.
I look around. It’s really small. There’s a tiny replica kitchenette, complete with small oven, burner top, and little shelves full of bottles of spices and cooking utensils. A pair of tongs adorns the prep top. A black lacquer chest sits against the rounded, opposite wall, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the shape of mountains, hazy clouds, and beautiful cranes. There is no bed. One tiny ebony table sits low to the ground—I guess you’re supposed to sit on the floor to eat there. There is an area where a vid screen should be, but it’s shut off. That’s it.
Wow. Even my jail cell was less bleak than this. I had vid screens (with limited input, of course—mostly movies heavy on the morality lessons); I had pictures of my family up (actually, that was the jail’s addition, not mine—they liked to psychologically manipulate me into maximum guilt). They even let me have my watch repair station, with the sharp tools getting sucked into the wall at lights-out, or any moment my physiology sensors showed I wasn’t safe to use them.
I want to look through the lacquer box. But she sees me staring at it, and she steps in front of it.
“So, you sleep—”
“In there,” she says, pointing to the opposite wall. “Will you let Cyclo take you, too?”
“Excuse me?”
“To sleep. It is the only way we sleep on this ship. Surely you knew that.”
I run my hand through my hair. “That’s not how I sleep, and I don’t plan on it. I’m here to observe you, not be the guinea pig myself.”
“Pig?” Her eyebrows raise. “I’m not a—”
“It’s an expression. Never mind.” I reach into the pocket of my vest and take out a card. It looks like a regular plastrix card that might hold all sorts of data, but this is where my smallest drones are parked. I have a few medium-size micro and centimeter drones in my pockets, and the larger ones are still parked on the bridge with all our equipment.
I love my nanos, though. These are invisible to a human’s normal vision, and electrostatically sealed to the card for safekeeping. I blink twice, and the driver program on my holofeed chip turns on. A translucent green screen pops up in a half-bubble around my face. On it, I can see one of fifty nanobots all charged and ready to deploy. Some are ready for aeronautic driving, some for aquatic, some for drilling down into solid tissue. I start mentally planning how I can drive one into her ear or nose. I could even drill one into her skin, stuck there gathering limited amounts of information. A second, if all goes well. Then I can drive one into her vascular system and park it in a capillary inside her brain.
I start by flying about ten into the nearby blue wall itself. And about ten seconds later, they all immediately register as nonfunctional on my holofeed. Damn. This ship just pinched my bots into oblivion.
Hana looks at the card with curiosity, not realizing what I just did, and not seeing the streaks of red lighting up behind her—I guess the ship might be cussing at me or something. Her eyes go from my card to the bubble of information between us, like the rest of the story is hidden in there somewhere.
“Okay. So, here’s the thing. I have these nanobot drones, and I’d like to drive one to hang out in your body to record your information before you go to sleep.”
“What about the story? The girl with the butterfly wings?” she asks, backing away.
I step back, giving her space. “I’ll tell you later. I promise.”
“Who is she?”
“Actually, she’s my sister.”
“And you haven’t listened to her message? Why not? I would do anything to hear a message from my mother.”
“Well, that’s not the same thing. Never mind,” I say, irritated. “But first, I have these drones—”
“No.” Her fingers spread out, reaching for the wall behind her. She shakes her head no, no, no.
I thought she’d be fine with this, which is ridiculous. If I met someone and they wanted to shove bots into me, I’d freak out, too.
“You know, it doesn’t even tickle. I’ve done this a million times. It won’t cause any harm.” I’m still holding the card up in my hand, wondering if my hesitation means that I already just voided my contract. I can wheedle and lie and get these drones into any organism I’ve ever wanted, but I don’t want to do that.
But Callandra.
Isn’t she more important than what Hana wants?
“No,” Hana repeats. She takes another step back to the wall, even though I’ve already moved backward myself. Cyclo’s walls are starting to flash two colors—white, which I’m coming to realize means a warning of sorts—and green. Though, turning my head, the green is only in a place she can see, not me.
Disappointment pulls my shoulders down. No means no, and it also means I’m going to fail the promises I’ve made to my sister.
“Damn it,” I mutter, and look down at my card, which had a bot ready to deploy. But with a flick of my eyes, I shut it down. “Damn. Okay. I won’t.”
Colors flash in the periphery of my vision. Something wet smacks against my right shoulder and back, hard, and I stumble forward.
“Cyclo! No!” Hana yells, her hand reaching out for me.
I look to see what’s hit me, and it’s a giant red wave of Cyclo’s matrix that’s risen up, thick like an amorphous limb, and attached to my arm and upper back. I holler, jumping forward to escape it when something hot and caustic burns my skin.
It’s dissolved through my jacket, and searing pain encases my shoulder.
I roar with pain.
“Cyclo, stop it! He wasn’t going to hurt me!” Hana yells and pleads, and somehow I’ve fallen to my knees, clawing at the thing attached to my body, trying to push it away. But you can’t push away something that’s amorphous and half liquid. My hand gets stuck, and the acid-burn sensation encases my hand.
I hear Hana yelling more, until she stops. The agony is so bad I can’t even scream anymore. Her voice comes through the white-hot pain blotting out my thoughts. It is calm, low, commanding.
“Stop. This. NOW.”
And then Cyclo’s reaching arm retreats from against my body. There is still pain, but it’s the pain of air touching raw nerve endings, thousands of them, like someone has plucked every nerve with a knife, over and over again.
I’m still kneeling on the floor when Hana rushes to me.
“Oh no. She’s burned right through your skin. I didn’t know she could do that. She must have thought you were hurting me.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I gasp. “You said no. You said no,” I repeat, over and over again, as if remembering will somehow make the pain go away. “Oh God. How am I going to do my work?” My body is shaking from the pain and shock. Tears pour from my eyes, saliva from my mouth because my body is going haywire. I look over to my right and see the raw, glistening, bloody flesh of my arm and shoulder. The skin is gone. It’s been burned completely away.
“She can help. I can help. Let me…”
Hana starts tugging at the remnants of my jacket and shirt, in tatters from being eaten away by the ship. I let her. I’m in no position to refuse her help. The cool air hits my torso, and normally it might feel good, but when part of your skin’s been flayed off, it doesn’t much matter. When she heads for my pants, I gasp.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“We have to go inside Cyclo, to heal your skin. She’ll be able to rebuild your collagen—”
“No!” I yell. “It just tried to kill me—I’m not going inside it!”
Hana puts her hand on my good shoulder, and her other one touches my cheek. “She was trying to help. She was. She didn’t understand—I promise we can fix it. I know we can.”
“This ship is falling apart. I can’t go in there,” I say, panting because I’m so short of breath for probably terrible reasons.
“I’ll go with you. I’ll be with you. She won’t hurt you if I’m protecting you. It was a mistake, I promise. Look, she’s so apologetic.”
My eyes look left, and the color of her room is flashing in peaches and pinks. Soothing colors. If a color could mean regret, I suppose that would be it. I take another look at my shoulder—and I can’t even see what’s happening on my upper back but half of it is screaming in pain. The medical equipment we brought with the Selkirk isn’t anything that can handle this severe a burn. We have no regenerative medicines because we’re supposed to die here, after all. But I can’t die without finishing my work.
My sister.
“Okay,” I say. My entire body is shaking so hard now, and I’m shivering like I’ve never shivered, not when we depressurized on a smuggling trip to Vega, or when I was mining ragnium on one of its distant, three-hundred-degrees-below-zero moons. “You promise”—my teeth are chattering so hard I can barely talk—“that it’s not going to kill me in there?”
“What is it they say? ‘Over my dead body.’ No, I will not let Cyclo harm you. We communicate even better inside her matrix. Almost instantly. It’s probably why she reacted so—our verbal skills aren’t as good as our chemical communication.”
I’m too tired and dizzy and in pain to even respond now, aside from a weak nod. Vaguely, I notice she is shedding her clothes until she’s bare and naked. It speaks to how absolutely wretched I feel that I’m not even remotely happy that a naked girl is next to me, yanking off the rest of my clothes. She pulls me, gently, toward a wall that is clear as blue ice—no curving endoskeleton marring the inside of the matrix as I’ve seen on other parts of the ship.
Hana goes behind me, wraps her right hand around my waist, and threads her fingers into my left hand.
“I’ll be with you. You’ll be all right, I promise.”
Everything happens very quickly. My legs go numb, fixed in place. I look down to see the blue goo of Cyclo quickly climbing up my legs. Hana, with her arms around me and her warm body against my back, has begun to sink rapidly into the wall, as if she had fallen horizontally into a soft bed of glassy water. With me in her arms, careful so she’s not touching my wounds, we start to fall into the blue, too, sending my chest into a riot of fast, furious breaths I can’t control.
“Hana,” I say, but when I turn my head, just over my shoulder I see that her face has already fallen beneath the surface and the blue has begun to take me as well. She closes her eyes in complete and utter surrender. The edges of blue come over her face until they reunite as liquid mercury does when it touches itself on a table—reconnecting, becoming one united mass again.
My bots and the card are lying on the floor in front of me, unlaunched.
I can feel Cyclo’s matrix oozing around my upper torso and neck, and my skin has gone numb. It’s covering my shoulder and the pain is already receding. Now, it’s climbing around my waist—skin temperature, which is even more freaky than if it were cold. Like I’m being eaten by a blood-warm tide.
“Wait. Wait,” I say, but I don’t know who I’m saying it to, because Hana has been mostly pulled into the matrix behind me, and I’m halfway in, too. In a moment of panic, I reflexively slap at it where it’s encased my waist.
Mistake. The goo holds on to my hand fast, stickier than anything I’ve ever touched. It doesn’t feel like it’s surrounding me—it feels like it’s incorporating me. My skin tingles in an almost narcotic way. My body is being forced under a wave of Cyclo’s matrix toward the wall where the girl has been sucked in. The goo is rising up to my neck now, touching my lower lip. In seconds, I won’t be able to breathe. I won’t be able to yell for help.
Hana’s arms are still around me, and they squeeze, perhaps to comfort me, but the squeezing only makes me realize I only have a few more breaths before I can’t breathe anymore.
My visor is still working, but the matrix will soon ooze over my forehead holofeed unit. Quickly, before I can even think, I flit my pupils up, right, right, blinking rapidly. On the card, a light blinks, activating a single nano drone. Using my visual-only command, I fly it straight into my open mouth—I can’t scream if I tried—and down past my epiglottis, trachea, past my right mainstem bronchus. It goes left, right, left, until it finds a globular alveolus. There, it’ll bore straight through the membrane between cells and settle into the flow of my bloodstream.
If this ship kills me, at least I’ll die knowing this: even in death, this data will help repay the wrongs I’ve done.
As the blue matrix flows down my throat, fills my nostrils and ears, and blackens my already numbed consciousness, it’s not my last thought, though. Only one regret plays over and over in my mind:
I never listened to the goodbye message on my pendant.
But now, it’s too late even for regrets.