A month in the simulation; a matter of hours in real time. Santi hallucinates himself in his body, half-starved and feather-light, and feels a thrill of claustrophobic reality. He rubs his eyes. “Thanks for breaking it to me gently.”

“Don’t worry.” Thora shakes a bottle of pills. “Remember, I’m a pro at thwarting destiny. I’ll follow you. We can try again next time.”

Santi sits up, fighting the fog in his mind. A dawning horror breaks through. “No.”

Thora crosses her arms. “If you’re seriously going to try and argue me out of killing myself—”

“It’s not that.” He grips the thin hospital sheet with sweating hands. “We only have eight years left. If we die—yes, we come back, but there’s no guarantee we’ll come back together. Sometimes we’ve arrived in the city ten, twenty years apart.”

Realization spreads across Thora’s face. “I guess it’s part of the design,” she says. “To give each of us periodic breaks from the simulation. But if the clock starts as soon as one of us gets back—”

“By the time we both arrive, we could already be dead.” Terror transfixes Santi, worse than the fear he felt when he saw the blank panels in the museum. He could die between lives and it would mean nothing. All their striving, everything they have learned from each other, all for them to end as two corpses in a box, cut off from an elsewhere they will never see.

“Fuck.” Thora gets to her feet, paces across the room. “Fuck! I don’t believe this. What, are they trying to keep things interesting?” She punches the wall.

“Thora.” He needs her to stop, to damp down her anger and give his own room to blaze.

She doesn’t understand. “Of course. This is where you tell me there’s a reason.” Her voice drips with bitterness. “Go on. Tell me what it all means.”

He screams it at her. “I can’t!”

Thora stares at him without recognition. He waits for her to fight back, to demand the argument he’s denying her. Another Thora might have done that, long ago. But this one closes her eyes and nods. When she leaves, she shuts the door quietly behind her.

Santi stares at the hospital ceiling, gray tiles spidered with meaningless faultlines. He has tried so hard, all his long lives, to understand. What he saw in the darkened exhibit hall felt like the ultimate vindication: there is a meaning, a purpose to their existence, and it is the one he has dreamt of since before he can remember. For that to be destroyed, by something so senseless, so arbitrary as a randomly programmed death, feels like the root of his world being torn out.

Thora isn’t here to see. He doesn’t have to be strong for her. He weeps in rage until he falls into an exhausted, furious sleep.