Core Drive: A Westworld Story

Reverie 2015-S: Joy

"What is that which is eternally and has no becoming, and again what is that which comes to be but is never ?" —PLATO; Timaeus.

*

During the entire drive to whatever mystery place Logan was taking her to, Joy wondered about the makeup of things. Of the way the world weaved and weft, how two people's lives could overlap to the extent that being apart from one another seemed an impossible loss to come back from.

She thought of her parents, and how solid they'd been—these towering monuments, symbols of love and affection—until they weren't. Being so young at the time of the divorce, Joy remembered very little of their fights, her untrained eyes too naïve to see the faults and cracks.

After the divorce, during that unkind and silent period when both her parents became crueller imitations of themselves, often pulling her and Theresa in whichever direction best won an argument, she'd learned to be afraid of love.

During Robert, before she'd become privy to insights of adoration shared between Arnold and Theresa, before she'd learned to yearn for sweetness in the form of imagining her own Charlie one day, Joy had found stability in her fear of love. A fear of the commitment, of the changing that came with it, but that could be avoided; mastered, if need be. But once exposed to it, that was a terrifying mess she never learned to clean up if things broke. And they always broke.

Then Arnold and Theresa happened, and Joy spent countless hours loving them more than they had time to love her back. She'd loved them the way she'd wanted to be loved by someone else but had been too terrified to be vulnerable with another person to allow them to do so. It wasn't until she held Charlie in her hands, his cheeks so full, his hair so thick and raven black, that she understood what the fear meant.

It was survival.

But after seeing Logan like that, still clothed and barely responsive in the shower, it had shaken her. The daunting reality that their argument had driven him to his old ways, to an extreme, and the doubly harrowing possibility that that extreme could have ended with Joy calling the emergency services number, it made her realise how afraid she was of Logan.

Of just how strongly he encompassed her—from heart to head.

Because, despite everything, despite their differences and incompatibility, she loved him, and it wouldn't be enough. Not after watching Arnold and Theresa dissolve into their bitterness, despite their obvious compatibility in the past.

"We're here," Logan uttered, his hand ready on the cab's door handle.

Joy looked out the window, mystified by the location. It was a poorly maintained aquarium, the entrance framed by a rusting arch. The silhouette of an octopus surrounded by bubbles hugged a retro-typeset with the park's name. Its name, barely legible, faded like the rest of the place.

"Charmed?" Logan tried and failed at a smile; brow quirked with tired mischief.

"Surprised," she clarified, hopping out of the cab and staring up at the arch, light bounding off the glass of a nearby skyrise, blinding her.

"It used to be different here," Logan looked everywhere but the arch, despondent to see so much change.

"Feels like everything is changing, faster than we can catch up with it," she made an effort to reach out and intertwine their fingers. "But sometimes, it's easier to just let the moment pass, I think."

It was hard for him, being there, simply standing still. It seemed to take the whole might of the universe to keep him perfectly still, his frame fragile despite the muscle she could've drawn from memory.