It took months for Shasa to forgive Elo. She couldn’t believe he had kept his involvement in Bru’s courtship a secret from her all those years. That he had let her think, for so long, that Bru and her meeting had been one of coincidence and fate.

  She took even longer to forgive Bru. But it took her only two weeks after his confession to return to ‘Heaven’. She told him that she still loved him, despite resenting his lie. At the end of the day, his confession changed nothing for her.

  Sure, their meeting was somewhat engineered. But she had fallen in love with him for who he really was. He couldn’t have faked the rest of his personality, interests, passions, quirks. He couldn’t have been putting on a show all those years together.

  And so her sessions at Heaven had continued.

  The sessions slowly became slightly less regular. Sometimes, Bru would refuse to meet her. Sometimes, she got busy, and missed the sessions. But by and large, their meetups continued, unchanged.

  A little more than a year on from Bru’s confession, Shasa showed up to a session to face a disgruntled Bru.

  “Someone must have been really busy,” he started off, grumbling. “Six weeks without a visit.”

  Shasa stared wide eyed at him. Bru hadn’t been passive aggressive in a long time. It had been one of the first things she had talked to him about. She disliked it, and stated that his passive aggressiveness didn’t serve any constructive purpose. He had been defensive, then apologetic, and eventually, rather sheepishly, agreed to be respectful and direct in stating his feelings and requests in future. It took some time before he completely ceased his passive aggressive behaviours with her, but he had eventually gotten the hang of it.

  His sudden passive aggressiveness wasn’t the only issue that stuck out to Shasa. It was what he had said. She had been visiting him regularly, twice a week for the past weeks.

  The cause behind his words hit her an instant later, and her heart plummeted. She must have deleted one argument too many. She must have erased the argument where she had told him about her dislike of passive aggressiveness.

  She had also been unable to save the past weeks’ visits in his memory. There had simply been no space.

  Bru studied her shocked countenance, and something clicked.

  “You have been here, haven’t you? You visited recently?” he asked. The sorrow was unmistakable in his eyes.

  She simply nodded. They were both silent for a while.

  “This is like that movie, the one with…” Bru knitted his brows. “The one we…we watched, something about…”

  Tears filled Shasa’s eyes. He didn’t remember one of their favourite movies. Nothing other than the gist of it. She had thought it would be fine, deleting trivial facts like that. But it hurt, to witness the effects of the deletions.

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  Bru’s shoulders slumped. He looked at her, dread tightening his lips.

  “I don’t even know what’s deleted, and what’s normal forgetting,” he said. “Sometimes, I try to recall something, an event I know was important, but I can’t. I know there’s something there, but I can’t reach it.”

  Shasa looked down, unable to bear the disconsolate look etched on his face.

  “Shasa. I’m tired. I’m scared. I don’t want to keep losing parts of my mind.”

  She didn’t respond. He willed her to lift her head, to look him in the eye.

  “I hate waiting around. I hate existing only in a cubicle. In a cylinder. I need to be free. I need peace.”

  In truth, he didn’t detest his existence in ‘Heaven’. He had opted to be shut down in between visits, so he was blissfully unaware, and for all intents and purposes, dead to the world during the intervals.

  He came back to existence around half an hour before each visit, for his mind to get attuned to the date, time and situation before he swooped into the cylinder to meet his visitors.

  It wasn’t a bad existence. Whenever he came back to ‘life’, there was another loved one, another friend waiting for him. And each meeting was short and sweet, full of nostalgia and meaningful conversations. He also hadn’t experienced dramatic lapses in memory or continuity of being until the recent sessions, those he could remember.

  But the gaps in his mind did scare him. There were times when he wasn’t sure what he should do or say, couldn’t remember what he would have done or said when he was alive. Those moments terrified him.

  But he still felt like himself, for the most part. His existence was still very much bearable, if not enjoyable.

  The only thing that made him hate his life in Heaven was witnessing Shasa’s stagnation. She was mired in grief, and hadn’t moved on after all these years. He hated being the cause of her stuckness. He hated trapping her in this town, away from her grand dreams of exploring the world.

  He couldn’t tell Shasa that, though. He needed her to believe that his simulated life was miserable as it was. A torture. He needed her to come to the conclusion that the kinder thing to do for him, would be to let him go.

  He needed her to move on. To live her life. To be loved, and love again, with a living person.

  Shasa hadn’t spoken. She kept her gaze trained on the ground before her.

  He braced himself to say the words he had wanted to say every session in the past year. He had held back, after Shasa had told him that she would stay alive and keep safe, only if he remained in Heaven. But he knew she couldn’t continue to live life this way.

  “Shasa, this isn’t living. This isn’t what I want for myself.” He couldn’t see her face as he spoke, which made him anxious. He rambled on.

  “I’m not even really me. The real me is dead. I’m a copy. A copy that’s becoming less and less faithful to the real me. I’m data. Digital codes. A patchwork of duplicated memories passing as a conscious being.” No response from Shasa.

  “Shasa, it’s time to let me go.” Bru said those words, and Shasa’s head drooped lower.

  When she finally looked up, her eyes were shining with tears. Then, she nodded.

  His jaw dropped. He kept quiet, not daring to speak, for fear that she would change her mind. Could she really be considering this? Would she really let him go?

  “One more session,” she finally said, voice hoarse. “One last session after today. Okay?”

  Bru stared at her, still somewhat in shock. An odd combination of sadness and relief coursed through his digital mind. Then he smiled through the tears that had begun to cascade down his face.

  “Okay.”