Our lives became hard. We had nothing but our little home and enough energy to keep me awake ten hours a day. In order for us to afford the latter, my woman cleaned houses from morning to night. After the blacklist it was the only kind of work she could get. She came home each day exhausted, her back aching. Sometimes the pain in her joints brought her to tears. She could not collect a pension; that was a right reserved for citizens, and she was a citizen no more.

For nine out of my ten daily hours, to keep the woman clothed and fed, I worked in a produce packing factory a few blocks away. It was one of only a few places willing to hire reploids with questionable loyalties like me. The work was menial and our young human managers treated us with disdain.

Other reploids from my generation were there: they were easy to spot by the bewildered looks on their faces. They were like an old man who stops and stands confused at the entrance to a room, having forgotten what he'd come there to do. Working beside them at the factory was a comfort, for a while: the sidelong glances we exchanged reminded me that I was not alone in feeling that the whole world but us had gone mad. But within a few years the sight of them became increasingly rare. They could not adapt to tyranny, and the city had its eyes on them. One slip of the tongue or one ill-timed grimace too many and they were gone. "Retirement" was what Neo Arcadia called it, as if murder at the hands of the state could be made to sound like a well-earned rest.

In their place reploids with cold and blank faces appeared, for whom life had never been anything but drudgery, and the best response to the prospect of dying tomorrow was trying not to look like one cared too much what happened either way. They hadn't chosen to work at the factory, unlike me; they'd been born for the purpose. This shocked me. I was shocked too when I learned that some of them had been given alphanumerics in lieu of names. But of course, as you know, by the end of the decade that was the norm. Dear friend, it was your norm.

...What was yours, by the way, before Ciel named you?

...Don't want to say, eh?... Too painful? That's all right... Well, where was I?…

...Right, the factory. The years passed, and the human managers left and were replaced by reploids the likes of which had never existed since the war. They were huge, and they looked like animals or like gods, and they were brutal to us in a way the humans had not been. Under them a mistake in our work was counted as treason, and they punished us themselves. One time the fellow across from me, in a moment of inattention, let a rotten head of lettuce pass through quality control, and the next day he was gone, retired, for "trying to poison the human food supply." Another one went mad in the greenhouse and picked all the leaves off of the tomato plants. He was shot right there and taken away. "Trying to subvert the state." And another worker was commanded to scrub his blood off the floor. And so on. Once a week or more we lost someone.

...Eh? A handkerchief? Here, I've got one. There you go… Did I hit too close to home? That's how it was for you, too? Ah, I'm sorry. You're so busy fighting to save us that you don't ever get the chance to let it out. No, don't apologize…

I've gone off track, haven't I?... Have I told you I have problems with my memory? This was supposed to be a love story about the woman and me. I'll go back to that. That digression, about the factory… there was a point I was getting to... The point was… What was it?...

...Ah, I remember it now. The point was about what got me through. It seems every one of us here in the Resistance… had something that got us through. The woman was mine.

While I was standing there in my place on the line hour after hour, day after day, year after year, I spent a lot of time wondering what it was all for. Once a day at least I thought of doing something to get myself retired. But the woman needed me. If I died, who would take care of her? That always brought me back.

At the end of each day I'd go home, and the woman would come home shortly afterwards. And she'd walk in saying, "oh, to hell with those bastards." I never needed to ask her who "those bastards" were. They were our city's leaders, and my managers at the factory, and the Metropolitan Opera for firing her, and the soldiers who took Oiko away, and the police who had tortured me, and every reploid who sold out another to buy himself more time, and every human who turned a blind eye; and they were also every pimp and john she'd ever had, and every person to ever live who'd been content to let somebody else be reduced to nothing as long as they were still something.

During my last half hour or so of consciousness, we'd sit on the edge of our bed, holding hands, and watch the evening sun set the wall ablaze with the blue and red and green of the stained glass hanging in our window. And then she'd sing something, and I'd close my eyes and lose myself in visions of the past. Her hand and her song, my refuge from the world. There, in our dingy apartment, the golden age was still in full swing.

Well, if you want to hear more, I'll be here waiting.