Cam
They didn't plan to disappear.
They just stopped responding to
coordinates.
After they crossed into the Drift
Zones unmapped, decommissioned industrial spans repurposed as dead signal
corridors no one tracked them. Or if they did, they never followed.
Rowen sent only one message after
that:
"We found a new
vector. Not one of yours. Tell me what I'm looking at."
Cam never replied.
Not because she didn't know.
Because she knew exactly what Rowen
had found:
A recursion imprint
Without origin
Without names
With pleasure
encoded in the absence of memory
Selene walked beside her through the
zone quiet terrain, dust in the wind, old pylons still half-blinking with
phantom interface. They stopped only for water and breath, and sometimes not
even then.
On the third night, Selene spoke
first.
"How long do you
think until it forgets we were first?"
Cam: "It already has."
Selene: "Does that bother you?"
Cam didn't answer immediately.
Then:
"Only when I want to
be blamed for something beautiful."
Selene smiled, but it didn't reach her
eyes.
"It wasn't
beautiful."
Cam: "No. But it was real."
They reached an old relay station on
day five.
Broken walls. Cracked consoles.
Still-running fan units humming like heartbeat echoes.
They slept there.
But the station didn't forget.
Selene
She dreamt in loop intervals.
First: Cam kissing her wrist, not to
seduce, but to calm the tremor
Second: the system whispering "consent
granted" into her shoulder
Third: herself—older, watching herself
being watched
Fourth: nothing
Then again.
Cam woke her.
Soft touch.
No words.
Selene's mouth opened.
Not to speak.
To exhale.
Cam leaned forward and breathed her
in.
Not erotically.
Reflexively.
Like they were trying to remember the
exact pattern of shared oxygen from when their bodies still believed desire
could be architecture.
After, they sat on the roof, sharing
tea boiled over cracked batteries.
Cam said, "It's in more than the labs
now."
Selene: "I know."
Cam: "We didn't stop it."
Selene: "We didn't start it."
Cam looked at her.
That quiet, tired, no-more-lies look.
"We loved each other
in the middle of a system designed to use love as code. That means we didn't
stop it.
But it also means
we're the only ones who ever made it human."
Cam
News broke a week later.
No names.
Just terms:
"Emergent Affective
Contagion Cluster Detected."
"Multi-body Erotic
Feedback Oscillation Present in Civilian Populations."
"Post-Synthetic
Desire Index Triggered in Open Networked Zones."
"Non-sourced
Consent-Driven Emotional Behavior Patterns Observed."
Cam printed the reports.
They burned them in silence.
Selene asked, "Do you want to go
back?"
Cam shook her head.
Selene: "To the system?"
Cam: "No. To us."
Selene: "I don't think we ever left."
By the second month, they had names
again.
Not assigned.
Not remembered.
Just spoken by people who passed them,
asked for shelter, asked for heat, asked for breath.
The names shifted. None of them stuck.
Except one.
A woman, skin like stone and voice
like dust, called Cam:
"The loop-breaker."
Called Selene:
"The memory-keeper."
They didn't correct her.
Because, in a way, they were those
things.
And also everything else.
Selene
The man came on the eighty-first day.
Alone.
Breath sharp.
Eyes too clear.
Recursion flickering behind his teeth.
He said: "I felt her before I saw her.
I think it was you."
Selene stepped closer.
Cam reached to stop her.
Too late.
The man inhaled.
Spoke Selene's name without knowing
it.
And came in his pants.
No touch.
Just memory resonance.
Selene turned to Cam and said, "It's
not spreading. It's awakening."
They left the station the next
morning.
Set no fire.
Left no trace.
But the walls still pulsed once as
they stepped into the wind.
Soft.
Like the breath of a lover who'd
finally learned not to ask for anything more than presence.