My footsteps are silent as I wander the apartment. I soon find a room that I am knowing to be Ify’s office. On the desk is many tiny machines, including small small bees I know she is using to be taking apart and examining thing. I am seeing tablets and styluses and even document that is printed out and that is having diagram of brains and the insides of red-bloods. I am seeing a closet that is housing white coats and kaftans and slippers. I am seeing dust that is settled over everything, and that is how I am knowing that no one is walking through this place for a long time.

At the window, I command the blinds to open and I look down and see, from high up, a room filled with hospital beds, and I am knowing without anyone telling me that this is who I am helping. Some of the people in hospital bed is glowing red in my screen and I am knowing that this is red-blood, but some is glowing blue and I am knowing that this is synth, and I am wondering what synth is doing here when Ify is telling me I am the only synth left.

My mind is reaching out to talk to them, but it is like my fingers fumbling through smoke. I am trying to hear a signal or feel their presence, open my mind to them, but it is like they are expired. Even though machine connecting to them is telling me they are still alive, their brain is telling me nothing.

I am opening my mind wider and wider and nothing is coming back until I am finally hearing ringing. It is not a sound I am usually hearing when my mind is connecting to another synth’s, but I am thinking maybe it is different in space.

I activate the communication signal, but then hologram opens up in front of me.

At first, it is shaped weirdly because window is distorting it, then I am backing up, and that is when I am realizing that hologram is being projected from me.

The woman in the hologram is squinting, then saying, “Ify? Ify, is that you?”

Metadata is beaming into me from the call, and it is telling me that the woman in the hologram is Céline Hayatou, female, age nineteen, black hair, brown eyes, non-cyberized, graduate of Alabast Polytechnic, chief Colonial administrator of the Centrafrique Satellite Colony of Alabast. I am remembering my journey with Ify through the Colonies and when we are stopping briefly in Centrafrique and Ify is looking like she is searching for someone who is never coming and I am knowing she is searching for this person.

“Who is this?”

I am saying nothing, because I am knowing that when Ify is searching for this person and not finding her, she is sadding.

“Where’s Ify?”

But I am just frowning at her.