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Digital daylight streams through a window that isn't really there, but her dreaming mind resists the call to wake, as much as she can wake here. She clings to the memory, dream, memory-dream of him, bed-warm and smiling, the hum of her ancient mother like a caress across her mind, the echo of laughter from the corridor as her human mother races past, and the Last Centurion's call of, "Am I close?" (Blind man's bluff? Oh, Dad, you never learn.)
Like calls to like. Fragmented memory dreaming of fragmented memories, of a time before she was a book forgotten on a shelf of guilt and grief, a time when she was alive (Oh, why is that word so sad?). She surfaces, light finally piercing the lines of code that are her eyelids, and she wonders. Perhaps it's time to send a message, ask her mother to teach her to wheeze-groan, wheeze-groan, wheeze-groan. Maybe it is time to fade away.