01101000 01101111 01110000 01100101 [Hope]

I see myself as if I'm not myself. My body, suspended on a web of cables; I see them lashed to my elbows and wrists, and twined around my torso. I am a puppet with cords for strings.

When I look up, I see them evanesce into thin air, no source nor terminus. When I look down, I see only myself. I am alone here, we are alone here—that hollow shell and I. My eyes hang open, but there's no light in them. I'm dressed in a launch-lab leotard. From my back rise a pair of wings, or at least it looks that way; if they're not wings, they're open fans, with wires instead of paper bridging their bones. An LED light blinks at the end of each spine. They're unfurled, yet motionless, just looming there dwarfing me. It seems that I should crack beneath their weight.

But when I do, it's not my back that gives, crushed by those great metal wings. It's my chest. A hatch there just sort of opens, unbidden; I hear the squeal of a rust-coated hinge, and then I can see inside of me. I'm all circuits, under my skin. A tangle of springs and wires with frayed ends, spitting electricity. In the very center – where my heart would be, if I had one – an old cooling fan sputters and coughs. As I watch, it grinds to a stop.

When the blades have creaked their last, the blight spreads north. My face begins to peel. It drops off like a mask with cut ribbons, makes a soft slick sound hitting the floor. Beneath it, my skull wears a sallow grin. My eyes are burnt-out bulbs, my cheeks glistening craters; thousands of gears click a dissonant rhythm in my head. As I watch, reels of magnetic tape spill out around my eyes – the kind they used to use in cassettes. It just comes and comes, a wet black fountain, and I can't help but think of human tears.

Suddenly, the cables give. They just weaken and snap, and I fall to the ground; no one comes to pick me up. I just lie there, facedown on white tile, oozing oil and smoke. The wings' joints groan as they fold, close over me like a cage. I catch a last glimpse of myself, limp behind the bars, before my body crumbles—before a fault down my back ruptures, and I shatter into metallic dust.

"Zima," I said on the first day, pushing up my shades, "can I ask you something?"

"I wish you would."

We'd chosen to ring in our reprieve on the rooftop, dozing in the sun. He sat with his back against the vent, and me in his lap; until I asked that question, and raised my head, he'd been playing with my hair. "What do you call it," I said slowly, "when…when you see things, even though you're supposed to be shut down? Or—not just see things, but hear them, and feel them too?" I paused, gathered my thoughts. Pressed my teeth into my lip. "Not memories. Not necessarily, anyway. Just—things, whether you know what they are, or—or not."

It took him a minute to answer. I just sat there, looking at him, until he lifted his shades; as he spoke, a smile crept over his lips. "Well, there's no 'com-specific term," he answered, "at least, not yet. But humans would call that a dream."

"A dream?" The word felt strange in my mouth.

"Yes. You had a dream."

"Hey, I never said I—" Zima raised an eyebrow. That was all it took, to remind me that I couldn't lie to him – not that I'd really wanted to. "Not just a dream," I admitted. "Three."

"Was that what your trouble was, then?"

"Yes." I sighed and let my head drop to his chest again, relieved to have told someone at last. Well, not just someone. He was the only one I'd wanted to tell. "I couldn't fix it. I tried, but—my systems said there was nothing wrong."

"Maybe your systems were right," he said. "Dreams aren't bad, Dita. Just human."

"Yeah, well, I'm not human." All of a sudden, I felt restless. I got to my feet and wandered away from him, towards the nearby edge of the roof; I folded my arms over the cast-iron rail. That day was warm, like most days. The sky was clear as glass. "And it should've been impossible."

Moments later, Zima slid his arms around me, his chin into the crook of my neck. I didn't pull away. "Has it occurred to you, love," he said, having buried a kiss or two in my neck, "that your dreams might have something to do with the other changes?" I felt his smile against my skin. "Surely you've noticed those."

"The other changes." I turned around to face him. He lifted his head to look down at me, but he didn't let me go. "You mean…like with May."

"Ms. Kano's 'com?"

"Yeah." My voice thickened just talking about her. What had happened with her – the things she'd said to me – still bothered me, more than anything else. If we're not doing what we were made to do, fulfilling our purpose on Earth—we might as well not be here at all. "I had to go in and troubleshoot her, one of the days you were down. Ms. Kano thought she was broken. But my scans couldn't find anything, and she…said she couldn't do it, work for Ms. Kano anymore. She said she wasn't happy, she—she'd never been happy, and it was only just then that she could say no. She said she didn't care what happened to her." Nestling into him, I closed my eyes, tried to purge the memory of the look on May's face. The resignation in her voice, when she'd said I don't care. "She asked me how I would feel if you weren't coming back."

His hand came to rest on the back of my head. "She was acting outside of her program. Doing what she wanted to do, instead of what she was told."

"Persocoms don't want to do anything," I mumbled into his coat. "Except what we're programmed to want to do."

"Right. And are you programmed to let me take you on a date, even though it's completely illogical? Are you programmed to sit on the terrace, making awkward small talk over food you can't eat, and speak to me as if I'm someone else? Are you programmed with the imagination necessary to pretend I'm an international jetsetter, who met you in line at a bookstore?"

I knew what he was getting at, and I didn't want to reach it. I couldn't. It was all too much for me. "I don't like this," I said, pulling loose from his arms, stalking aimlessly across the roof. "Any of it. The impossible things, the ano—I mean, the dreams – God, I just want something to make sense again. Is that so much to ask?"

"Making sense is overrated."

"I'm being serious, Zima!" I whipped my head around to glare at him, still standing there by the rail. "I need answers. How is this happening? Why?"

"I've no idea how, love. But I can venture a guess as to why."

Without his shades, his eyes caught the sunlight, glowing like cats' eyes even against the bright sky. They spoke a language all their own, his eyes. When he had a thought brewing, as I was sure he did now, they didn't throw back what they drank in – just caught and jarred the sun, as if it were a firefly. "You think it was her, don't you?" I said before he could, and saw on his face that I was right. "She did something! I should've known!"

"Dita, I don't know for sure—"

"Don't you?" Churning with revived frustration, I stormed back over to him and grabbed a strap of his coat, jerked him down to make him look me in the eye. "Don't you dare lie to me again."

"I'm not lying." He could've shaken me off as easily as a housefly, but he didn't. He let me hold him still and he looked me in the eye, even as I glowered at him. "You went a few minutes before me—" and he knew exactly why, the rat "—but I was shut down in the end, too. When she did what she did – whatever she did – the only ones there were her, the woman who made her, and the boy. Who would have entered the data? How could I possibly know?" Pulling his shades from his pocket, he showed them to me. "I came to, and my tracker said the program had stopped. That's all."

I let him go. "Fine. But all of that stuff you said, about the right thing to do – about being more than a persocom – is that what this is?"

"I can only guess." He sighed, half-under his breath. Flicked his gaze towards the sky. "I can only hope."

"Computers don't hope," I snapped without thinking. It had become something of a reflex for me, countering his nonsense with logic. But this point, given the evidence, mine hardly seemed an argument worth making. "I should've known," I repeated, more to myself than him. "I should've known. That girl—"

"Chi."

"What?"

"Oh, nothing," Zima said absently. "I was just saying, her name was Chi."

"I don't care what her name was."

"Really?" His eyes, having rested only briefly on my face, began to drift again. As I blinked up to follow them – to try to see what he saw, in the blue gulf of the sky – he slung an arm around my shoulders, and pulled me against him. "I find it rather interesting, myself. Haven't you ever thought about how we got our names?"

"No, Zima. I never have."

"Not even once?" For the first time that day, the wind kicked up and fluttered his hair. I heard the buckles on his collar clink. "Humans like to talk about God," he said, maybe to me, maybe to the sky, "or whoever it is they think made them. They want to know why they're here. We know why we're here, but why these names? Why these faces? Who decided on all of the little things – the reasons we are who we are?" The longer he spoke – and honestly, he might as well have been speaking in code, for all I grasped of what he said – the more I realized I didn't like it, him not looking at me. As if I'd said it aloud, his gaze dropped down to mine, and he took my chin between his index finger and thumb. "Who's the artist," he said, planting a kiss between my eyes, "to thank for this masterpiece?"

He smiled and my face flushed, for what felt like the thousandth time since he'd come back. "Stop trying to distract me."

Taking advantage of his hold on me, he tipped my head back and bent to kiss my neck. Apparently, that was the hot spot today. "I'm not trying to distract you," he murmured. "I'm trying to get you to relax, and enjoy our time off while it lasts."

I squirmed my way out of his embrace, unable to stop it bothering me. He could ignore it if he liked, but the fact remained that that girl – I flatly refused to call her any name, but especially not one as ridiculous as Chi – had done something, and it was changing us all. If Zima thought so, it had to be true. "Who does she think she is?" I fumed aloud, beginning to pace the roof. "Who says she knows what's best for us? You know what we should do is, we should go back and find her – make her tell us what she did, and why."

"I have a better idea. Let's not and say we did." He went back and flopped down against the vent, folding his arms behind his head. "Just come back and sit with me, love. We don't need to worry about this right now."

I frowned. "You never worry about anything."

"And that," he answered, "is precisely why I'm so happy."

Pulling his shades from his pocket, he slid them over his eyes, effectively ending the conversation. But I wasn't finished with him yet. Plunking myself down on his lap – as hard as I could, just to see him wince – I snatched away the shades, and held him out of his reach. Or not out of his reach exactly, since his arms were longer than mine, but farther than he'd disturb himself to grab. "Are you really going to tell me," I demanded, "that this doesn't bother you at all?"

"Of course not. You practically crushing me – not to mention stealing my shades – bothers me quite a bit."

"Zima!"

"What?" He took one last stab at avoiding the question, blinking up at me with innocent eyes. As though if he really didn't know what I meant. As though, if he played dumb long and hard enough, I might just forget the whole thing. "Dita," he finally sighed, shoulders slumping, arms falling to his sides, "even if you did go back there, and you can't – even if she could tell you what she did, and I wouldn't count on it – how would it help? What would you do, once you knew for sure? What are you hoping would change?"

There was that word again. Hope. Why was he so fond of that word? "I don't know. I just—I need to—"

"You don't need to do anything." He extended an arm for his shades, prying them gently from my hand. When he had them, he brought that hand close and kissed it, and I felt his bangs tickle my wrist. "Just let it happen, love. It's about time."