A Little Girl Called I

Code One

The sky is grey and bleak—
I fall asleep with my teddy bear nestled next to me.
Bot 505 hovers at the edge of the room, sending me wave sounds that help me sleep.
But I haven't slept. At least not yet.
He says give it time to work.
His voice is programmed to sound as close as possible to my brother's. I don't remember him, so I could never rate it from 1 to 10. But every night the bot tells me goodnight and pulls the thin blanket over me. My brother was the one who programmed that. He must love me very much to go through great lengths.
It's another year in a number of years no one is bothering to count—
The historians have given up, and the mathematicians' minds are too rusty to go through complex calculations at this point.
The world is standing at its hinges. Not that it was ever sitting on a golden platter, or pulled by a silver anchor—Life was always lonely, but shrouded with illusion.
Now, we—what's left of us humans are slapped with the truth. We are unfashionably late and unfathomably alone.
My thoughts are many, that by the time I reach the third row, my small feet perched on a step-ladder, I drift into bottomless sea.
I dream of the sea, and the stars that float there.
The school of fishes are studying how to dive head first into air—
And I laugh, and they twist to see me, and I think they're blinking but their bodies hasn't programmed lashes yet.
We get along quite well.
I dive with them, and return to them shells stranded on the shore from high tide.
On low tide, I sit on the wet sands and tell them a story.
It's midnight and I'm still on my second tale, and they listen intently. A mother fish lies down her eggs and sighs happily as she listens to me. She works hard for her children and I work hard to commit telling the tale truthfully. Writers are all liars, but there is truth in lies, a pattern—a method of making sense and connecting. An outright lie that feels like a lie is a writer's greatest mistake and sin.
I wonder what it feels like to care for someone so deeply to watch over them the way that mother fish did. To protect them, stand by them, and even sacrifice sleep for them.
Sleep is so precious. I could not possibly let a second trickle by and be gone without voyaging to the realm of dreams, and spending it there. Time was money—and I, Narthia, famished with it. I'm so rich, these fishes have no idea.
I wake up at noon from Bot 505's saliva, he's still deep in slumber, snoring.
His oil was leaking again, and I wipe it with the tip of my dress, and his fans were working slow—causing more noise.
I am worried.
So I venture out, out of the quarantine zone, to find supplies.
I'd do anything for Bot 505–