Claire

Raymond was more relaxed now, his shoulders less tense. Claire felt her way around his neck, afraid to kiss him, thinking he'd be cold like she felt the air, almost wetting her skin.

He moved slower than when in her home, so his hands reached her back after a too-long wait. They felt strange on her skin, smooth, like being touched by a rubber glove.

"It's why I didn't rush to kiss you when I first saw you," he said. "I know you don't have the enhancements I have. I don't know how it would make you feel. I can test," he brightened.

He was clearly overwhelmed by his brand new rebel persona, although his fight for their victory had been the most passive of all, the opposite of what Claire usually liked in a man. It forced her to fight for herself, so she discovered she liked it more.

"And you?" she asked. "How do you feel... me?"

"I can feel anything I want, but with my human senses? Close to nothing," he said. They were still not letting go of each other, so it must've been more than that. "I'm mostly remembering."

"You were right," she said. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that it's you."

"I want to show you something," he did the opposite of what she would've liked him to, releasing her, moving to a door that hadn't been there before.

"You're going to show me your pod?" Not even Raymond having lived most of his life in it could qualify it as a home.

"No," he was amused by her open disgust. "I don't think you'll find it riveting."

He let her go in first, overly serious, only to ask, out of the blue, once Claire met another empty room, "But first, what would be your top five most annoying couples from your life?"

Blocked, Claire had to think, "What do you mean?"

"You know, couples who have bright smiles on their faces all the time?" Raymond said, still serious, "You must know a few of those. Too happy?"

It sounded like a joke, but Claire didn't get it, so she assumed he was literally asking her for a top five.

"I can't think of one," she was honest. "I always feared they weren't as happy as they looked." It was a relief hearing they were.

Raymond tilted his head to direct her attention to the wall opposite the door, commanded somehow to turn transparent. Through it, the outlines of an atom's metallic skeleton of which their room was a part of, inlined with what looked like a galaxy of others. No lights, no doors, no windows. Just black squares marking rows of similar cells, as if Claire and Raymond were the only ones home.  Their own light dim -- it didn't have a source, the darkness was grayed out in the room as if by a camera filter.

Being in space, the snowflake structure didn't have an up or down, just converging its lines to its center, a planet untouched by it, like in a metallic cocoon.

"We left Earth?" she recognized the blue. "Did something happen to it?"

"Nothing like that," he said. "We were getting overpopulated, the space for others always the last on our minds. And we were fine with that, as prioritizing humans had been the key to our success. We filled every corner of the map, added new territories to fit more of us. Advancing as we went along, technology making our lives better. We had optimized resource management to the point where we were practically self-sustainable, even producing our own oxygen. Soon we could simulate a walk through a rainforest, no need to keep so much of it. Only when planning our afterlives became a possibility we realized how we were limiting our own options."

"For our experience," he explained. "In order to have a satisfying one, we had to build on something that existed, common for all. We could invent worlds, new physics. Anyone could build their own world, inviting their friends to join. But in order to build something together, a fantasy to which more of us could relate, we had to have a common denominator. You can invent millions of types of forests, the one that will get to the most other people to join you enjoying it is the one based on some basic concept that is common. And you can invent your own trees, but for you to get an idea that others understand, the concept has to have been created. You can invent something, but no human can decide which is the best one for all, the golden copy."

"We can't invent something out of nothing," Raymond said. "It has to have existed -- or happened. So we let nature create the source. Our own selfishness made us let it take its course, observing it for own purposes. Exactly like we did with history."

"So now the Earth is human-free? What is down there?" Claire asked.

"Depends on what point in time you look, because we can look at all. What would be considered the end of Earth is it entering its infinite state. No life anywhere. Around it, we'll still be here, infinitely alive. All of us, we hope. It is our goal."

She didn't have anything to say to that.

"This is actually one of the last Observatories that make it visible for the human eye. The rest just display in what we call "actual resolution", a complete imitation of what it looks, feels, is. Soon, ones like this will close, no one watches the Earth like this anymore. There's no need."

The window zoomed in until the Earth was its center.

"It's electronically amplified, but it gets to pretty high fidelity. So what time do you want to see?"

"I'm going to see 2019 by stepping on asphalt while traveling the world," Claire decided. "What's the point of having an entire rainforest down there if you can't walk through it? Just to... walk it in your mind, knowing you will never actually touch a leaf?"

Raymond smiled, he was done showing her irrelevant information.

"Let's go home," Claire said.

"We're not going to live in your house," he closed the viewing window, now a wall identical to the rest. "Claire and Tony Wesley moved out of their home for a new job. We have two agents on autopilot who handled it. I have access to all my files, now," he smiled as if to impress her with his new knowledge.

"I meant 2019," she said. Wherever it was, they'd be together.