Chapter Text
Makishima Shogo only sleeps four hours per night.
By now Choe Gu-Sung is used to the soft shuffle of his lover moving through the house in the late hours, the rustle of pages next to him, sometimes, as he drifts off. When he stirs in the middle of the night he recognizes through a haze the warmth next to him, the regularity of both their breathing. Holographic rain runs down the windows, reflects transparent shadows on the ceiling above them like unreadable glyphs. When he wakes in the morning, however early, the place next to him in bed is already empty, an indentation barely warm.
I don’t mind this, Choe says. Though it is rather…
“Odd?” Shogo asks, smiling in that way of his which is inquisitive but not really. When Shogo asks a question, it is always from the vantage point of someone who already knows the answer. “Maybe I don’t sleep. Who knows, that just might be possible for someone Sibyl can’t read, don’t you think?”
“There’s a perfectly ordinary explanation,” Choe replies. “You just have an aberrant copy of the hDEC2 gene.”
“Ah, but it’s no good to let science take away the mystery of everything, is it?”
“It’s just the opposite. The more we study something, the more we learn about it, the more mysterious it becomes.” Like living with someone, he wants to add, sharing with them a certain space and a given number of years. It is impossible, it is absurd that Makishima Shogo can be defined by a series of numbers and equations, the helices of his existence unwound and translated into some universal code. Sibyl has agreed.
Let us begin, then, by learning what we do not yet know. Let me find out what it’s like for us to fall asleep together, to stay entwined until dawn.
He thinks of saying this but is not sure how it will come out, how it will sound in this foreign language. There are times when his accent slips, always when he is talking about the two of them, when he suddenly cannot find the right word and makes up for it with a frown that is half a smile.
So what Choe says, instead, is: “I wonder, do you dream of electric sheep?”
If he had been a moment slower he would have caught a paperback with his face.