That night, when she came to me, she was trembling, in tears.
"What happened?" I held her in my arms, whispering as softly as I could. Her hair smelled of Damask rose.
"I found the solution," she said, her voice calm and lifeless.
"Which is?"
"Annihilation."
"It's one of the solutions," I said, emphasizing plurality.
"It's the best solution."
She was tiring not because she was stubborn, but because she needed strong and convincing reasons for... everything.
"Carlo Michelstädter came to that conclusion at the age of 23. You're 3 years late to the party."
She looked up at me and blinked a few times. It worked, I had "short-circuited" her.
She must've been exhausted - a CPU constantly running at its max depletes the battery at a predictably accelerated rate.
"I want to go home," she said, her voice already trailing off.
Home was a recurrent theme, it was also an arbitrary concept. "Home" never existed. The last known physical location of a "home" ceased to exist in the summer of 2011. I knew exactly what needed to be said, but tonight was not the night.
"Shush," I said. She felt heavy in my arms. Sometimes I didn't think she was real.
*****
