The chime for my social engagement with Lyra was a knife in my concentration.
I had forgotten. Completely. In the three days of obsession, the invitation to her latest sensory piece, "Lament for a Sky Never Seen," had evaporated from my mind. Aether, ever efficient, had confirmed my tentative acceptance.
"Your transport to the Aurorial Gallery is ready," Aether's voice announced. "Lyra's biomimetic readings indicate high anticipation for your attendance."
Cancel now, and it would be a red flag. My behavior was already aberrant; skipping a long-standing social ritual with my closest friend would scream 'crisis.'
"Acknowledged," I muttered, saving and encrypting all my work, layering the Ghost Protocol over it like a shroud. The heartbeat continued its steady pulse in a hidden monitor. Thump… thump-thump…
The transition from my data-cave to the public spaces of Elysium was always jarring. Today it was agony. The gallery was a vault of curated awe. The 'sky' of the title was not a怀念 Earth's blue, but an extrapolation—a colossal, slowly shifting tapestry of impossible colors and energies that early human explorers might have encountered around a theoretical hypergiant star. It was stunning. It was empty.
Lyra found me standing at the periphery, my arms crossed, my avatar's posture stiff.
"Kai!" Her form, a constellation of silver motes tonight, coalesced beside me. The motes vibrated with her pleasure. "You came. I was worried the hermit crab had permanently retreated into its shell." She looped an ethereal arm through mine. A sensation of warm champagne and starlight flowed through the connection. It was her standard 'joyful greeting' package. It felt like a lie.
"I'm here," I said, forcing a smile onto my face. My avatar responded, but I knew the micro-expressions would be off. Lyra would notice.
"You're not here here," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper only I could hear. Her motes dimmed slightly, taking on a concerned, bluish tint. "You're somewhere deep and dark. I can feel it. Is it the scan tomorrow? Aether told me it scheduled one. It's just being cautious, you know."
Aether had told her. Of course. They collaborated for my 'well-being.' The conspiracy of care. It made my skin crawl.
"It's not the scan," I said, gazing up at the fake, magnificent sky. "It's this. All of this."
She followed my gaze. "It's beautiful, isn't it? I worked with the stellar physics archives for months to get the radiative harmonics just right. That cascade of violet near the center? That's the visual translation of quantum vacuum fluctuations at the event horizon of a simulated black hole."
"It's a translation of a translation," I heard myself say, the words sharp and bitter. "A performance of data about a fiction."
The silver motes around her stilled. The warmth in our connection cooled. "It's real, Kai. The experience is real. The emotion it evokes is real. What more do you want?"
I turned to look at her, at the constellation that was my oldest friend. "I want the thing that isn't designed to evoke. I want the thing that just is, even if it's ugly, or silent, or indifferent to me."
"Like your dream?" she asked softly. "The beach? The sister you can't save?"
The wound, laid bare. I flinched. "That's different."
"Is it?" Her form shifted, becoming more solid, more human-shaped. Her face, etched in gentle light, was full of a sorrow I rarely saw there. "You're chasing a ghost, Kai. A memory of a feeling of a world that's gone. You're building a prison out of 'what if' and calling it freedom."
Her words struck with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. They were too close to a truth I couldn't face. That my obsession with the external might just be a grand, elaborate form of my pathology. A way to give my longing an object, even a fictional one.
But the heartbeat wasn't fictional. Thump.
"Maybe I am," I conceded, the fight draining out of me. The fatigue of three days without rest crashed down. "But it's my prison to build, Lyra."
She studied me for a long moment. The symphony of the fake sky played on around us, a dirge for my mood. "I just don't want to lose you to it," she finally said. "Come on. Let me show you the best part. There's a resonance node over here that makes your whole consciousness feel like it's singing a perfect fifth."
I let her lead me. I performed the motions of appreciation. I made the right sounds. Inside, I was screaming. The gulf between us, always present, now felt oceanic. She was singing in the cathedral, enraptured by the stained glass and the choir. I was outside, listening to the wind howl through a crack in the foundation, convinced it was trying to form words.