This morning I spotted Yongki walking through headquarters, looking pale as a ghost.
I could see he wasn't just hung over.
I knew the look because I'd been there myself, just recently.
He was wandering in the direction of the archive until I steered him into my office instead.
Yongki looked past me, muttering about how he'd just quit.
I hugged him to show I understood.
Then he whispered something for my ears only, something I knew I wouldn't forget as long as I lived.
Which it turned out was only about half a second longer-as long as it took for his vest to blast us into superheated plasma.
But now all those chunks of us are reversing direction and reintegrating, so Uma can lean in and try to hear Yongki's last words.
And now we're flying apart again, passing through her like she isn't there, because of course she wasn't in my office when this actually happened.
I stopped existing at the point of that explosion-or really, really soon afterwards.
I'm just an emulation of the late Santiago 2.0 now, that Uma's running in her damned Genesis engine.
Sucks to be me, huh?