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“Coretta and I are working on soul waves. Are you working on them too? Or do you still hate it? Because of our family’s obsession with transhumanism, we stayed far away from that field. After all, we are, in a way, advanced cyborgs, ambassadors of transhumanism, and we hate it. But you will find yourself in that field again. After all, you could never escape that absolute power your family injected into your veins. Now we need it for Mina. I need to develop a new life form to stay with her forever. I need to figure out what my family did when I was little. That’s why I started researching the concept of consciousness, trying to figure out what makes her Mina. Her soul? What’s a soul? What do we have besides religious explanations? Is the soul a deception? The soul has never been something science has been interested in, but I can’t seem to stop chasing after it. If I put my beautiful Mina into a metal body, would I still love her? What if my Mina were reincarnated in the body of an old man? Would I still love her? We realized we could observe the subconscious frequencies and neural activity of every being; I simply call these soul waves. Now we have developed a device can separate and arrange them in a textual sequence. Then we made another device converts these textual sequences into light energy; I wanted to name it Mimi, but Coretta said it sounded too childish. For now, we’re calling it Soulprint, like a fingerprint. It’s very cliché, but we couldn’t think of anything cooler for now. We did our first experiment on small things. A dead mouse. It was successful. The mouse got up and came back to life, but even though the soul wave was the same as before, we don’t know yet if we can try the device on a human. Coretta said maybe we should close this file; she doesn’t enjoy playing God. But I can’t let this go. I can’t tell her I’ve been involved in playing God since the moment I was born. I haven’t even told my Mina yet. She knows about my arm and my eyes, but I can’t bring myself to tell her I’m immortal. Maybe I never will.”

I stopped the recording.

No. This was impossible.

My other self would have continued in its monotonous voice, but I recoiled as if I had heard the devil’s whisper. The possibility someone else might be listening to this recording frightened me so much I considered throwing the device out the window. The fact that this information, which was supposed to go with me to the grave, was freely floating in a wormhole between two dimensions filled me with dread.

You won’t have a grave.

Right. I was the great discovery of Mars. My family’s crucial experiment, their precious son, their absolute power… The truth was my family were little more than corrupted alchemists.

They were obsessed with immortality.

The chip I had given Mina was designed to keep my body intact. My organs could fail, but as long as a fragment of my flesh remained on the planet, I would not die. At least, that was what I knew. My body behaved as though it were made of countless tiny organisms, capable of reassembling themselves and returning to their original form.

I had first noticed this while staying with Penelope’s family.

When Penelope’s father tried to kill her, the man attacked me before taking his last breath. The blade bit deep, and warmth poured down my chest. He pulled once, twice, and something in my neck gave way.

My head hit the floor and rolled. I lay on my cheek on the cold stone, still blinking, still thinking. Across the room, my body knelt for a moment, twitching, before it toppled.

There was no spray of crimson, no agonizing scream. Just the dry, frantic skittering of a billion tiny insects beneath my skin, already working to stitch the body back together. When my mother came home and saw Penelope’s father dead, she screamed. She hadn’t reacted at all to my dismembered body.

What did you think at that moment, mother? Did you think how successful you were when you approached me calmly? What were you thinking when you effortlessly put my head back in place and slapped me? I realized I desired to be real with that slap, but I was so far from real—why did you deprive me of the one thing I desired? How does someone who never dies truly live? How does ‘it’ become real?

Later, I had cut my fingers, but my flesh regenerated itself within minutes. If my mother hadn’t come, would my body have regenerated my head as well? I tried to cut myself everywhere, severed my arm, slashed my legs, wished I was mistaken, but no… After all that blood had been spilled, the severed meat continued to regenerate itself. That’s why I kept telling Mina to destroy me, until there was nothing left of me. Because if there was no flesh left, I could truly die.

My beautiful Mina seemed capable of achieving this. Only she.

Even before she had learned my true identity, she had shown me beauties I could never have imagined. She always wrapped her arms around me with genuine love. And every time, I felt as though she were embracing my soul. Her warm fingers could touch my soul.

My organs could be torn to pieces, my body could be an immortal piece of flesh would always live on, but thanks to Mina, my soul had a place to call home. Every time her gaze was on me, it added a complementary meaning to my existence. Every living soul needed to be filled with someone like her. She could even love a creature like me. Such beautiful, divine girl…

Yet Mina didn’t desire to be human; she despised being one. She hated emotional outbursts and being vulnerable. Well, that was what I loved most about her. People who lived their emotions to the fullest always fascinated me; they were in such a high place I could never compete with them.

However, we did have one thing in common. We were not satisfied with the bodies we had been given and were searching for something higher. Perhaps I couldn’t express it as clearly as her, but both of us were trying to cope with more emotions and questions than we could contain.

We had no other choice but each other.

Forever.

That damned word my mother whispered in my ear whenever I lay on the operating table.

Forever, the exact opposite of reality. The endless nights that word poisoned me. The endless hours she explained to me the metal arm she had made from my broken bones… No matter how much I turned my head away, I couldn’t escape the foul smell of blood, the solutions made from the remains of different creatures. The white electric light numbing my brain, the yellow liquid injected into my pierced arm over and over again…

“No…”

I threw the headphones away, my lungs began to heave forcefully, they wanted to burst out of my ribcage. I feared if I wasn’t careful, they might actually come out of my body. At that time, I was very young, unsure of what my family had done to me, and there were still things about my own body I hadn’t discovered. The only person who knew part of the truth—not the whole truth—was Sebastian Loxton. The main reason he was so insistent on making me his heir was because he was certain I was a superior human. The first living example of transhumanism. He believed I would become the greatest leader of the planet Mars.

Stop being weak, Ray.

All the terrible facts I had pushed into the background in that labyrinth with Mina had now come to the surface. Facing the outside world was a disaster for me; I shouldn’t have left, I shouldn’t have stayed away from Mina.

The other Raymond was right, without her, I was so close to madness. Without being next to my real, I was close to turning into the thing I feared most.

You’ll live forever. You’ll be alone forever.

The word forever was a curse for me; I didn’t want to be connected to it—to rule over it. I had said the same thing to Mina when we first met. Eternity is not something I can control. But the only thing she cared about was this. Her eternity was beautiful, not destructive like my family’s. So warm, so nurturing… She deconstructed the meaning of forever in me. She healed everything inside me without noticing. She was the cure for my soul. As long as she was by my side, I had made peace with eternity. With myself.