“I’m so sorry I lost you,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry for what they did to you.” His words break again and again as he weeps. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.”
Sasuke hugs his brother’s neck tight. He doesn’t say a word. Maybe he can’t, as data. He has reached the limits of what he can do.
Time seems to stand still. Finally, when Sasuke pulls back, he transforms again, this time into his teenage iteration. Even taller, lankier. Dark circles under his eyes. He’s no longer wearing the scarf.
But he does recognize his brother. “Ni-san,” he says as he stands up, looking on at the bowed figure before him. Hideo rises to meet his gaze. “You created the NeuroLink because of me.”
“Everything I’ve ever done was for you,” Hideo replies.
If it wasn’t for Sasuke’s disappearance, the NeuroLink might never have existed. And if it wasn’t for the NeuroLink, Sasuke wouldn’t be standing here like a ghost from the machine. It is a strange circle.
The young Sasuke disappears again, and finally, in his place, stands the only version of him that I’ve ever known: Zero, clad in black armor from head to toe, silent and cold. He stands over the broken, soulless robot that Hideo had been fighting.
I tremble at the sight of him. We may have been able to rejoin him with Sasuke, but his decisions are out of my hands and entirely with him. I have no idea what he’ll do at this point. Would Sasuke choose to continue what Zero had been relentlessly pursuing? Immortality and control? Maybe he still would, and then all of this would have been pointless.
“What are you going to do?” Hideo says to him in a quiet voice.
Zero doesn’t respond right away. He’s hesitant now, and in his hesitation, I can see the different versions of his past life merging inside him, filling up part of the well that had been hollowed out of him for so long. He doesn’t seem to know what he wants anymore.
“If I don’t have a physical form,” he finally says, “am I still real?”
As I look on, something strange happens. My father appears before me, with his familiar black outfit and his polished shoes and his sleeve of colorful tattoos. His hair glints in the light.
It’s not him, of course. It’s the NeuroLink, somehow generating this hallucination before me, using the bits of memories I have left to piece together some semblance of him.
But he looks at me now, stopping before me and giving me that quirky grin I remember. It’s as if he were truly here, like he’d never died at all.
“Hi, Emi,” he says.
Hi, Dad. My vision hazes with tears, real tears, ones I can feel sliding down my face.
His smile softens. “I’m so proud of you.”
They’re not his real words. They’re words simulated by the system, piecing together what it knows of my father to create his ghost. But I don’t care. I don’t dwell on it. All I focus on is the figure of him standing before me like he never went anywhere at all, his hands tucked casually in his pockets. Maybe, if I walk out of here, he’ll come with me, and it will be like he has always been here.
“I promise I’ll miss you forever,” I whisper.
“I promise I’ll miss you forever,” he echoes. Maybe it’s all the system can do.
He stays a distance from me, and I a distance from him. And before I can say anything more, before I can ask him if he’ll stay, he vanishes. Gone in the blink of an eye.
If you had asked me before whether virtual reality could ever cross over into reality, I would have shaken my head and disagreed. It’s obvious to me what’s real and what isn’t, what should and shouldn’t be.
But there is a point where the lines start to blur, and I am standing in that place now, struggling to see through the gray. Maybe this is where Taylor had lost her way, too, where she had gone searching for something noble and ended up in the dark.
Real. My father was real, and so was Sasuke, and so is Sasuke now, even though he has no physical form. He’s real because of the way Hideo is looking back at him, because he had been loved and grieved, had loved and grieved others.
“You once asked me what I’d wish for, if I could wish for anything,” Zero finally says to his brother. “Do you remember that?”
Hideo nods once. “I’d wish you back.”
He pauses to glance in my direction before looking at Hideo. “No, you wouldn’t,” he replies. “The world has already shifted because of the past. It’s changed because of it. Make sure it changed for the better.”
“Am I ever going to see you again?” Hideo asks him. In his voice is his lost self, the boy who grew up with a silver streak of grief in his hair.
And that’s when I realize that, at the end, we’d all wish for the same thing.
Just a little more time.
Sasuke transforms once more. The opaque black helmet shielding him now folds away, plate by plate, to reveal a face—the same face I’d seen when I first joined the Blackcoats. It is like looking at Hideo through a mirror, a vision of what Sasuke might have been. He stares at his brother for a long moment.
I hold my breath, wondering what he’ll choose to do now.
He lifts his hand once. Around us, the world crumples, the buildings and sky and park turning into digits and data. Code being wiped.
I let out my breath. My body suddenly feels like my own again, and the ice-cold numbness that had invaded my mind is no longer here.
Sasuke has chosen to dismantle what Zero was building.
Then, finally, he vanishes from sight. Hideo makes a movement forward, as if he could somehow keep his brother here, but Sasuke doesn’t reappear. The virtual world around us—the dark sky and the ruined, unfinished city—fades away, too, and a moment later, we’re back inside the panic room, alone.
Every inch of my body feels sore and awake, and I wonder if everyone else in the world is slowly waking up now, too, if Hammie and Asher and Roshan are clutching their heads and groaning. Maybe they won’t even remember all that had happened. Already, everything feels less like reality and more like just a nightmare.
I suck in a deep breath. My limbs become my own again, and a tingling runs through me as if I’d simply been sleeping on my arms and legs too long. The virtual world has entirely disappeared, leaving me feeling disoriented back in the real world. Near me, Hideo is still leaning against the wall, his face pale and wet with tears.
I crawl to him and touch his face. “Hey,” I whisper.
He turns weakly toward me. With all his energy spent, and everything we’d set out to do now done, he seems to sag under an overwhelming weight. His gaze wavers between one state of consciousness and another.
“You’re here,” he exhales, then closes his eyes in exhausted relief.
“Hideo,” I say as I hold his face, but he’s slipping away, his breathing slowing.
Loud banging from the other side of the door makes me jerk my head in its direction. Through my tears, I see the door to the panic room finally break open, letting in a flood of artificial light. My hand immediately flies up to shield my eyes. The power in the building has been reconnected.
In swarm figures clothed all in black. At first, I think they’re Zero’s guards, maybe still under some kind of influence—but then I catch the glint of badges on their sleeves. They’re not Zero’s guards at all, but the police, freed from the algorithm’s hold. There must be dozens of them. Their shouts are deafening. I can’t even count how many of their guns are raised, all pointed toward us until we’re covered in a sheet of red dots.
“He’s hurt!” I hear myself call out, my voice hoarse, tears still streaming down my face. “Be careful—he’s hurt!”