Taro awoke to find himself lying down on his couch. The TV was off and a comforter was draped over his body. Taro sat up and closed his hands behind his head. He scanned the area and sighed. Just as he had feared, Ryoko Asakura was gone.

Taro stood up and walked to the television. He ran his hand over the side and was excited to find Ryoko's 128 gigabyte data stick plugged into the port. He quickly pressed the TV's power button.

But when the set came on, the screen was black. Some white block words appeared at the top left of the monitor; "RECOGNIZING USB DEVICE." Seconds later Taro felt his gut twist in two when, beneath that message, the words "No Data Found" appeared.

"Damn," he said to himself as he shook his head. He jogged over to his studio and looked around. The painting of Ryoko was still there. She looked beautiful dressed in her sexy prison garb… holding that sledgehammer. Tara sat down on the platform next to the real sledgehammer and put his face in his hands.

After several sighs, he got up and walked back to his kitchen. It had been a while since Taro made his own tea. But he figured he'd need to get back into the habit. He reached for the empty pan sitting on his hot plate and pulled it toward him. But the handle slipped out of his fingers. The pan struck the ground with a loud "CLANG!"

Just then he heard a groan coming from his bed. The blankets were moving. Taro's eyes grew wide with a combination of surprise and joy when Ryoko Asakura peeked her head out from under the blanket. With blinking eyes, she smiled and looked down at the floor.

"You klutz!" She giggled and shook her head. Then she yawned and stretched her arms. "Don't you know that making tea is my job?" She turned and sat up, draping her legs over the edge of the bed.

"Sorry," Taro replied with a wide smile and a chuckle. As she approached him, Taro noticed that Ryoko was still wearing the same high school T-shirt. He watched her as she walked by, picked up the pan, and walked it over to the sink; pleased that those same tight blue gymnastics shorts still hugged her hips.

Taro's brain was swimming with questions. But he decided to hold off until they were sitting together at the kitchen table, nursing warm mugs full of fragrant tea.

Taro initiated what he knew was going to be a very memorable conversation. "I had the feeling you were going to leave me last night."

Ryoko looked down at her mug. "I had that feeling, too."

"Why did you stay?"

She shrugged. "Because I couldn't leave."

Taro looked over at the TV - the screen was still black but for the "No Data Found" message. "You don't seem to need the television anymore. Though I'm still not sure why you needed it in the first place."

"No, I don't need it anymore."

"But you still can't leave?"

Ryoko looked at Taro as if he'd slapped her. "Do you want me to leave?"

"No! No! No! Of course not! No!" Taro shook his head. "No."

Ryoko hid her smile by taking a sip of her tea. She set down her mug. "Okay. I'm ready to tell you whatever you want to know."

"Wow." Taro didn't believe, after all this time, this was really happening. Part of him was afraid to find out things he didn't want to know. But he knew that if his relationship with this girl was going to move forward, he had to know what he was getting in to.

"Are you real?" he asked. "Or maybe I should ask, what are you?"

"I'm a person. Just like you. Just a little different," she said.

"Okay, but in what way? Why the thing with the video tape and the television?"

"My root origin is digital. I was created to be an interface between a digital entity and your human world, so I share traits from both worlds. But I've had to sever my links to that digital entity… so now I'm just a human."

Taro pointed to the television. "But you're not. No human can do that."

"It's a long story."

"You promised to tell me everything."

"While I was doing my duty, as a humanoid interface, I got bored. I thought it might liven things up if I killed someone… a human in my school."

Taro looked at Ryoko's shirt. "The school was North High?"

Ryoko nodded. "But another humanoid interface, my immediate superior, intervened. My data connection to the digital entity was terminated. I was in the process of being deleted. But I escaped." Ryoko paused. "Part of me escaped."

"Was this person, the person you wanted to kill, a bad person?"

Ryoko shook her head. "No. He was actually very nice."

Something was wrong here. But there had to be a good explanation. Taro decided not to pursue it for the moment.

"How did you escape?"

"I was able to piggyback my digital minimal self onto an analog data stream. I basically flew through the air for a while in a disembodied state. Somehow I managed to make my first home on an analog storage device, a video tape onto which someone was recording."

Taro nodded. "Right below that radio tower. In that room at the Sky Tower Cabins." Taro had a difficult time believing what he was hearing. Yet he had experienced it. And the proof was sitting right in front of him. "That just can't be possible. You're a living, breathing human being now. How do you get to that from being… What did you call it? … Your digital minimal self?"

Ryoko laughed. "It wasn't easy." She put her hand over Taro's. "You're actually digital, too. Every cell in your hand carries the code that made you. Your DNA. It's really just a computer program. And you share 99.9999% of that same program with every other person in the world. That why you have eyes, and ears, and lungs, and everything that makes you… human. When I was being erased, I was dying. But I managed to save that unique part of me, that .0001% that made me special... to videotape." Ryoko giggled. "That's when the hard work to rebuild myself started. But I knew enough about our digital nature to manage it."

Taro considered her words. "You included instructions."

"That's right."

"The data center…"

"Yes, the data center next door was the key. Before that I was really struggling, doing what I could with the processors available, and the data energy ionizing the air."

"That's why you lived under that tower on the hill. The one they named the Sky Tower Cabins after. And why you stayed here, next to the communications center."

"Yep. Then Lito forced me to accelerate my plans. That was an iffy time for me. But it all worked out for the best. I broke in next door. Then I hijacked the parallel processing power of 2488 computers for thirty-six hours, on and off. Nobody even noticed. They don't run a very efficient place over there." Ryoko giggled again. "Eventually I was able to fully recreate my matrix. Nature abhors a vacuum, so it decided to fill in the rest." Ryoko put out her arms. "And here I am."

"Wow. So you're just as human as me now? You don't need the processors in the TV or that data stick."

Ryoko nodded. "Yes, I'm as human as you. Except that I know how to exist and manipulate data in the digital realm."

"Could you teach me how to do that?"

"Sure. But it would take a hundred years… unless I reconfigured your synapses." Ryoko smiled and moved her hand to Taro's head. "It wouldn't hurt."

Taro held up his hand. "No. That's okay."

This was amazing! It was all starting to make sense to Taro. But how was such a thing possible? And how could such a world, this crazy invisible digital world Ryoko came from, even exist?

"Want more tea?" Ryoko asked.

Taro nodded. Ryoko looked over at the pan sitting on the hot plate. Then she put out her palm sideways and extended two fingers. Taro gasped when an elegant silver teapot materialized in Ryoko's hand.

"How did you…?"

"I create the digital matrix, and nature fills in the rest." Ryoko giggled sweetly. "It's an amazing universe."

"You're telling me."