Oh, but Kai would never do such a thing. He would want to remember. He would want to make things right because that was who he was, and so that was what he did. He made everything right. He avenged her. And then he locked himself inside a simulation so he didn’t have to keep living in this world without her. Because helovedher. He loved her and belonged to her and couldn’t live without her.
That was the truth.
That was therealityof it.
Shakily, breathlessly, I moved my finger over the screen when it began to darken and tapped on one of the attached pictures below the article, Kai and his wife attending some kind of award event.
She was young and beautiful, of course she was, airy as the branches of a willow tree in her long, sparkling green dress. And he was standing right next to her in his black suit and tie, also very young, also devastatingly beautiful, holding her around the waist, her hand on his, keeping him there.
There was no name for the feeling in my chest. No language had been invented yet to express the pain of losing a person you never had. No, it wasn’t disillusionment or heartbreak or loss or grief or a wretched, goring feeling of complete and irreversible abandonment. It was everything all at once. It was all the things we would never do, all the memories we would never share. It was all the memories we did share and the all-consuming, physical need to return to them. To the old cottage. To spend one more day together, hanging the laundry, swimming in the ocean, cooking dinner, reading, talking, making love, doing nothing. Nothing at all but existing in each other’s world.
Yes, nostalgia. The sentimental yearning for something you can never have back. To be able to tell the curious girl I was in that place:You know what it means now. Now, you know.
Chapter Twenty-one
Ispent most of that drizzly Monday morning running up and down the shops looking for a postcard until finally, someone suggested to me that I check out the National Gallery’s gift shop.
An hour later, I was sitting down at a table for two at the museum’s cafe with a postcard, an envelope, a clean sheet of paper, and a black-inked pen arranged neatly before me.
The cafe was quiet and warmly lit with expansive paneled windows overlooking a lush courtyard area, the kind of elaborate architectural decision you rarely encountered these days. It was so beautiful and peaceful here, it almost felt like I was Inside again, and as I waited for the waitress to bring me my coffee, I thought about beauty and the boundless human yearning for it. I wondered if this yearning was innate or something learned and formed by society, and then I imagined the things Kai would have to say about this. Imagined that one day, I would actually get to hear them.
The coffee was velvet-smooth and sweet, served in one of those sturdy ceramic mugs that enriched the taste.I’m going to get myself one of those, I thought, and after a delightful sip or two, I picked up the pen and wrote down my name and address on the back of the postcard, the front of it featuring an oil painting of a striking but tempestuous ocean sight.
Then, after another sip of warmth, I pulled the unlined paper before me and began to write my thoughts with no order and with no other intention but to share them with him.
Kai,
Before I say anything else, let me acknowledge the inconvenience, outdatedness, and therefore ridiculousness of this particular method of contact. It’s absurd, I know. But after nearly a year of living Inside, this is what feels most comfortable to me, and I’m no longer in the business of denying myself such simple comforts. Besides, you did send me a postcard yourself once, although I never got to receive it.
A better woman, a kinder woman, I think, would not try to contact you at all. She would let you go completely, let you wake up from the Program feeling healed and restored, and leave you to rebuild your life in any way that makes sense to you.
But unfortunately for the both of us, I am not this woman. I am Anya Larsson, and for a very brief time in the strange and beautiful world of Nostalgia, I knew you and you knew me.
Of course, you won’t remember any of this because your memories from the Program will be deleted as soon as you awake from it. What you will remember, though, is that you lost someone you loved very much in real life, and so you left this world for a little bit, maybe to forget, maybe to escape, maybe both, and now you’ve returned to it feeling, if not healed, at least much better.
Only that you won’t know why you are feeling better or how to keep feeling better. And that, I suppose, will be a different kind of suffering. A very odd and inexpressible kind.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m seeing it all wrong. Maybe Hive really is the future of human development, and I’m just hurt on a personal level because my mind sort of rejected the whole thing. After all, they’re deleting all the bad, aren’t they? But what about preventing them? What about remembering the best parts of humanity instead of deleting all the worst?
Control is the reason we can’t make reality better. Too many different consciousnesses. Too many different realities coexisting. The world is made of many worlds. So they offer us escape. They show us how ambition is not only synonymous with outstanding success but also with finding contentment in the ordinary, how you don’t need to lead an extraordinary life in order to deserve to live, and how society as a whole can heal itself by practicing empathy and accountability. We learn all of this, and then they take it away from us so we don’t spiral into psychosis. And how can I argue with that? I’m not a doctor. I can hardly grasp the way the simulation has affected me, and I’m only one person. Maybe people would really lose their minds if they started to perceive this experience as something more than a mere wellness retreat.
But at the same time, I can’t help but wonder, what does that mean for humanity in the long run? Because the whole concept of escaping to a different reality attributes to real life a certain irreparable quality. And maybe we are living in an irreparable world. After all, reality is a living, evolving thing, and like all living, evolving things, it must eventually die so something else can be born.
Maybe our boredom with everything we understand and the obsession with everything we don’t is the natural progression of things. Maybe the reason we all feel so hopeless at the moment is because we can sense that the world as we know it is running towards its inevitable annihilation.
But, you know, historically speaking, the human race has always been suffering. We have always been looking for a place that isn’t here, losing ourselves in story and art and the great mysteries of the universe. People look at the moon and the stars and make up stories about them, and for a little while they forget about their own problems. They bring themselves into the story, and the story becomes subversive. Meaning gets made. The world expands to fit even more worlds.
So maybe that’s what we’ll continue to do now to soothe ourselves and to connect to something greater than we are. Or maybe not. At this point I don’t really know if I’m supposed to know, if my purpose in this life is to obtain all these answers, or if it is to simply live it. Live as kindly and generously as I am able to.
And, at any rate, this is not the reason I’m writing you at all. I’m writing you because I want you to know there is a person out here who knows and remembers the person you were in there. And if you ever want to learn about him, you can always come to me, and I will tell you everything.
It’s funny because the first moments after I learned who you are in real life, I felt so defeated, like I had swum through an ocean of fire just to land in the middle of a tragedy. To have met you like this, to have found you and loved you and lost you, to have to spend the rest of my life healing from the wound of knowing you seemed unbearable. But then I asked myself: Is it really a wound, or is it a gift? I think so much of life are gifts we mistake for tragedies.
Everyone wishes they could turn back time. Everyone wants to escape. Everyone is longing for something they can’t have. Live a day of that life again and die, you find yourself thinking. Nostalgia becomes a prison. The cell that keeps you from the only moment you ever get to live. Now. And right now, I am certain that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life longing for the person I was in there, the person I was with you. I want to remember her so that maybe one day I can become her.
But if you don’t want to remember, if you want to close this chapter of your life forever and move on, please know that you will be fine and that I will be fine too. More than fine, probably. Because I still got to love you even if it was only for a little bit.
Although a part of me will always reject the concept of the Programs, I will still be grateful for Nostalgia because it brought me to you.
