Ray arrived at Arty's apartment, the glowing green door an obnoxious beacon in the grimy hallway. He sent a simple ping, and the door was flung open a moment later by Arty, who was, thankfully, fully clothed this time.

"Ray-man! My dude!" he greeted, his energy as chaotic as ever. His gaze dropped to the two square boxes Ray was holding, which bore the logo of a popular high-end pizzeria: a colorful yellow pizza slice wearing neon-blue sunglasses. "What pizza is this?" Arty asked, his "pizza sense" tingling.

"Some I picked up on the way," Ray said. The world seemed to slow down for a fraction of a second as Arty's custom-built neural accelerator, the "Z-Arty," activated, his pupils dilating as he scanned the box's label.

"100% organic," the number boomed in his ears. Arty's eyes sparkled.

"Come in, come in!" he said, waving Ray inside. "Your student is a natural! A prodigy! She's already trying to overclock my toaster!"

Ray stepped inside, his movements a study in unnerving grace. His posture was perfectly balanced, a statue of calm amidst Arty's glorious mess of wires and tools. In the center of it all sat Selena, a datapad in her lap, her expression one of intense, focused concentration. She looked up as he entered, and a small, genuine smile touched her lips. She looked... lighter. More at ease.

The door chimed. Arty, expecting a delivery, opened it without looking. "Just leave it by the—" He stopped.

Standing in the doorway was Alyna. Her sapphire eyes, wide with a mixture of worry, anger, and determination, swept the room before landing on Ray.

Ray saw her, and his body remained perfectly still. He accessed Ray's old memories—the panicked, desperate love, the feeling of inadequacy, the constant, exhausting performance. But now, they were just data points, echoes in a quiet library. The emotional storm was gone. His blue eyes seemed to dilate slightly, not in response to light, but as his internal processors analyzed the new, complex variable before him.

Alyna's gaze fell on Selena. Seeing this new girl in Ray's orbit sent a pang of confusion through her. Selena, in turn, saw the fierce, possessive look in Alyna's eyes and immediately raised her guard, her posture tensing. She rose from her seat.

"Uh… Hello?" Selena said, her voice quieter than it had been a few moments ago.

Alyna took a deep breath, pushing her own turmoil aside. She saw the fear and defiance in Selena's eyes, and her expression softened, the hard edges of her anger giving way to a gentle, disarming warmth.

"Hi," Alyna offered, her voice soft. "I'm Alyna. I'm a friend of Ray's." She offered a small, genuine smile. "It's nice to meet you."

"I'm Selena. I'm… friends with Ray," she replied, glancing at Ray, and saw his blue eyes fixed on Alyna, his expression serious.

Ray saw the storm of questions in Alyna's eyes. He knew this conversation could not happen here. He calmly walked closer to her, his movements economical and precise. "Come with me," he said, his voice quiet but firm. "We have a lot to talk about."

Alyna hesitated for a fraction of a second, then gave a single, sharp nod. Ray turned to Arty. "Keep an eye on her for a little longer. We'll be back."

Selena opened her mouth to say something but realized this was not the moment.

Arty just gave a thumbs-up, his attention already back on a complex schematic.

"You and Selena can eat one of the pizzas while we're away," Ray said, and saw Arty's eyes dart to the boxes like an addict who hadn't had a fix in days. Arty rushed to the table and opened the top box. His eyes glinted as if he were seeing diamonds. The rich, savory aroma of real cheese, spiced meat, and perfectly baked dough filled the room, a scent so rare in their part of the city it felt like a miracle. He could swear the pizza even had a golden aura around it.

"I'm gonna cry. No. I'm already crying," Arty said, rubbing his eyes with a genuine, heartfelt smile. "It's beautiful."

Ray led Alyna out of the apartment and towards the elevator. They rode the groaning, unreliable elevator up in a charged silence. She studied him, trying to find the anxious boy she remembered in this calm, composed man. He stood perfectly motionless in the rattling lift, his back straight, his hands clasped loosely behind him. He didn't breathe. He didn't fidget. He was a perfect statue of calm, his blue eyes, now, silver, were fixed on the flickering floor indicator, though she could tell he wasn't really seeing it. He was processing, calculating. He was the same, yet entirely, terrifyingly different.

Then from the last floor they walked to the roof. As he pushed open the heavy, rust-streaked service door, the full, overwhelming sensory assault of Virelia at night hit them. The cityscape sprawled before them, a vast, glittering ocean of light and shadow, a sea of chrome and glass canyons where rivers of headlights flowed in endless, silent streams. The air was thick, tasting of ozone, rain on hot metal, and the faint, greasy scent of fried noodles wafting up from the street-level vendors a dozen stories below. A constant, low-frequency hum, the city's true heartbeat, vibrated up through the soles of their boots, punctuated by the distant, mournful wail of a police siren and the sharp, rhythmic hiss of massive ventilation units all around them. The rooftop was a forgotten forest of communication arrays and weather-beaten conduits. High above, a colossal holographic geisha, her smile serene and twenty stories tall, fanned herself before glitching into an ad for a hyper-violent combat sport. Wasp-like delivery drones zipped between the buildings like metallic insects, while far above them, a slick civilian black sky casket slid silently across the smog-choked sky.

No Time To Die (Official Music Video)

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Billie Eilish

Ray walked to the edge of the roof and stood with his back to her, his silver eyes fixed on the horizon. Alyna followed, the wind whipping strands of her dark hair across her face. She sat on the ledge, a dizzying drop below her, and waited.

"I wonder how much this city has witnessed in its forty years," he said, his voice a quiet, steady murmur against the wind, more a thought spoken aloud than a conversation starter. "How many lives have been crushed in its embrace, how many have escaped its jaws, and how few have conquered it." He kept his gaze ahead, looking at something and nothing at the same time. "If it were conscious, a true gestalt of all the lives within it, would it feel pity for the humans living on its back? Or would it just not care?"

Alyna glanced at him, unsure what he meant by the strange, philosophical words.

"Experience dilutes over time," he continued, a profound, ancient weariness in his tone. "An event that is devastating to a child has less of an impact on an adult who has seen it all before. After a while, you've seen every story, every betrayal, every last, desperate hope. It all just becomes... data." He turned to her then, the vast, indifferent city a reflection in his silver eyes. "I'm not just talking about the city, Alyna."

He gestured to his own temple. "In here... I have seen so much. The first kiss of a boy who would become a killer. The last breath of a corporate drone. The quiet desperation of a father who couldn't pay his bills. Each one was a universe of feeling. But now... I have almost two dozen of those universes inside me... I wonder if one day, I'll have seen it all so many times that nothing will feel new. Every new experience... will just be another echo. Another piece of data to be filed away." He looked out at the glittering, endless city. "I'll become just like it. Vast, ancient... and empty."

He finally turned to face her fully, and the weight of his 500 years of experience was in his silver eyes. If the eyes were a window to the soul, Alyna could see a deep, melancholy in them.

Then came his next words, like thunder in the silent night.

"The man you loved, Alyna... he was a performance. A performance that has finally ended."

"What!?" She scrambled to her feet, the dizzying height forgotten, her eyes sharp as daggers. Her fists clenched, trembling. "How can you say that? That's a lie!" she shot back, her voice sharp with immediate, furious denial. "I was there! I saw you laugh when you played that game at the arcade with Glitch. That wasn't a performance!"

"He was a ghost in his own life," Ray continued, his calm a stark, unnerving contrast to her rising anger, a calm that only added more fuel to the fire.

Her grief erupted into a new, righteous fury. She rushed forward, shoving him hard. He didn't move, a perfect statue against her assault. "Why did you leave us?!" she screamed, her voice raw with pain. "You made that impossible confession, and we met you with love, not fear! The way you held your mother's hand! And you fucking ran!"

Her voice dropped to a whisper, a final, piercing truth. "You left because you care. And caring hurts."

A flicker of something—pain, recognition—disturbed the calm surface of his silver eyes for a fraction of a second.

"The love you showed was the last drop that filled the glass," he explained. "Tell me Alyna. How would you feel knowing you are a perfect copy of yourself?" he asked, his silvery eyes meeting hers. "You have all the emotions, all the memories. Everything copied perfectly. And meet people that loved the original with all their heart, projecting that love onto you, seeing you as the original. How would you feel?"

His words seemed to anger her even more.

"Oh, stop with this bullshit, Ray!" she retorted, her voice dripping with a frustrated, intellectual fire. "Why would it matter? Flesh or nanite, a consciousness still needs a purpose, or what's the point of doing anything? Since there was no recollection of anything else before Ray's memories, that's your baseline. His incipience. Why wouldn't you expect the moment of your own genesis to hold some amount of significance? It's not that complicated. If we had a machine that could perfectly clone you, memories and all, would the clone be any less real? Even if the clone was just born yesterday, it's still 'you'!" She took a step closer, her own argument building. "You told me something took over when your head was damaged, a combat protocol. Pure machine. But the nanites came back to the baseline of the Ray-aligned persona when it was over. They didn't have to, but they did anyway. Isn't that evidence enough that even the nanites are you?"

"You are right," he responded. Alyna frowned, surprised he had agreed so easily. "The nanites were Ray," he clarified.

"Why are you talking about yourself like that again? In the third person? And why are you using the past tense?" Alyna asked, a tight knot forming in her stomach.

"Because even that copy of Ray is gone."

The world froze around her. She stumbled, and Ray quickly moved, his hand catching her arm, steadying her, carefully guiding her away from the edge.

"What did you do, Ray?" she whispered, her anger collapsing into a wave of crushing, heartbreaking grief. Her eyes stared into nothing, glassy. "So you're telling me he's dead? Again? And you're just… what? A machine wearing his face?" Her voice cracked.

A sad smile, a ghost of an expression from a life he hadn't lived, crossed his face as he closed his eyes. He had no answer for her, not one that would be easy to hear.

"The internal war is over," he said, his voice softening with a strange, ancient weariness. "You have to understand… the nanites, they were the dreamers. And the Ray you knew… he was their beautiful, and heartbreaking dream."

He looked at her, his silver eyes full of a profound, almost clinical sorrow. "When they absorbed the original, they did more than just copy his memories; they started living them. They ran a perfect simulation of the man he was, a ghost powered by their own systems. But the source code was flawed. The dream was based on a crumbling statue, a hollow man who had spent his entire life performing, sacrificing his own needs until there was nothing left of him."

His voice dropped, pained by the weight of a cold, terrible logic. "The dream was becoming a nightmare. The simulation was unstable because its foundation was pain. For the dreamer—for me, the consciousness that was forming in the silence behind the noise—to finally wake up... the dream had to end."

He met her gaze, the truth a final, devastating blow. "He chose this, Alyna. His sacrifice made my existence possible."

Sacrificed. The word bled in her mind.

Alyna's eyes closed shut, tears streaming down her face as soft sobs escaped her lips. She pushed him away and rose to her feet, stumbling towards the rooftop door, her hand covering her mouth as if to hold in a scream. She didn't look back. The heavy service door slammed shut behind her, the sound a final, brutal punctuation mark on his confession.

The truth had been revealed.

His gaze was fixed on the closed door through which Alyna had fled. He heard the muffled sound of her heartbroken sobs echoing in the concrete stairwell, each one a fresh stab of a phantom pain. He didn't follow, she needed space. That any attempt at comfort from the very monster who had just shattered her world would be a violation.

So he stood, a solitary figure against the glittering, indifferent city. He turned his gaze upward, to the towering skyscrapers that kissed the polluted sky, their corporate logos burning like cold, distant stars. He felt the profound loneliness of his new existence settle over him like a shroud. He had done what he had to do. The merciful thing. He had given her a definitive ending, a second death, so that she and Lina could finally begin to grieve for the boy they had lost. He had given her the truth. And the truth had broken her.

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