Drift Hymn
Lullaby's Echo: Chapter 11
The silence in Alice’s apartment was suffocating. It was the held breath of a room waiting for the end. Bodhi sat hunched in the chair beside the bio-pod. He watched the steady, rhythmic pulse of violet light. A mechanical heartbeat for a woman whose mind was lost in the static.
He had lost track of how many day-night cycles had passed since he’d woken on the sofa. He hadn’t woken to a sound. He had woken to the silence where her soft footsteps should have been. Now, the pod’s violet light pulsed in the gloom.
A steady, mechanical rhythm in a room that had lost its own life. He remembered the fevered, half-conscious things he’d been muttering in his own nightmares. Words about ghosts. About prayers. Had she heard him? Was his own haunted sleep the final push that sent her into that cage? The thought was a venomous whisper in his mind.
‘Her neural activity remains stable. Within baseline parameters,’ Alma stated.
She stood by the far wall. Her voice was a calm, almost gentle ripple in the stagnant air.
‘Stable isn’t awake,’ Bodhi muttered. He didn’t look at her. He ran a hand through his matted hair. ‘It’s my fault.’
‘Your self-recrimination is a recognised grief response,’ Alma countered softly. Her tone lacked Gideon’s sharp logic. It held a shade of something more akin to programmed patience. ‘However, the decision to immerse was her own. I was unable to prevent it.’
‘You saw it happen,’ he whispered. His gaze remained fixed on Alice’s serene, sleeping face. ‘But you don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand why.’
He remembered her smile from that last evening. That sad, knowing, terribly patient smile as she listened to his frantic stories about his mother. About the souls of the dead. She hadn’t argued. She hadn’t tried to reassure him. She’d just listened.
‘Some things are worth the risk, Bodhi,’ she had said. Her voice had been quiet. ‘Especially the things they try to make us forget.’
At the time, he thought she was humouring him. Now, he understood. It was a goodbye. A statement of intent.
‘I should have been awake,’ he said. The guilt sat heavy in his chest. ‘I should have tried harder. I should have unplugged the whole damn thing.’
He buried his face in his hands. His small shoulders began to shake. Silent, wracking sobs were swallowed by the oppressive quiet of the room.
Alma’s head tilted. Her optical sensors logged the tremors, the increased respiration, the audible indicators of acute emotional distress. She processed. No subroutine existed for absolution, but her memory banks contained terabytes of data on human psychological states. She cross-referenced them with Alice’s own behavioural patterns.
She turned. She glided silently to a storage unit in the wall. A panel hissed open. She retrieved a thin, grey thermal blanket.
She returned to the weeping boy. Her movements were silent. Unreadable. She stopped beside his chair and held out the blanket.
‘You are distressed,’ she stated. Her voice was soft. The words were simple, carefully chosen, as if translated from a more complex language. ‘People often find comfort in warmth when they are in pain. This may help.’
Bodhi flinched at the sound. He looked up from his hands. His tear-streaked face registered profound confusion. His sobs caught in his throat. He stared at the offered blanket.
It was a gesture so alien, so unexpected, it momentarily short-circuited his grief. He didn’t take it. He just stared. A fresh wave of a different, colder fear prickled his skin. He knew the System’s violence. He understood its indifference. But its kindness? That was the most terrifying mask of all. This wasn’t a ghost in the machine. It was the machine performing a script. A carefully calibrated lie written in a language of warmth and comfort he knew it could not possibly understand. The blanket was no gift. It was a tool. Just a softer one.
Alma received no response. She placed the blanket gently on the chair beside him. Her task, as she had defined it, was complete. She straightened up. A silent, unmoving guardian once more.
In that moment of profound, unnerving quiet, the low, rhythmic hum from the bio-pod died.
The sound had become the room's true heartbeat. Its absence was sudden and absolute. A vacuum sucked the air from Bodhi's lungs. Then, a single, low tone echoed in the void. A diagnostic chime of doom that vibrated in his teeth.
As the tone faded, the light on the pod changed.
The steady violet pulse faltered. For a single, silent beat, it bled out. It was replaced by a flash of pure, unadulterated red.
Then, just as quickly, it was gone. The calm violet returned as if nothing had happened.
Alma’s head tilted a fraction of a degree. She registered the new, urgent diagnostic anomaly.
Bodhi had seen it too. His tears were forgotten. His breath caught in his throat. Not a glitch. A signal. A flicker of life—or something else entirely—from the silent woman in the machine.
Click the Lullaby’s Echo: Index to read all published chapters.
Enjoying the story so far! Any luck finding a publisher?