“What are you doing here? Don’t you know that if they find you here, they’ll kill me?” But I can’t blame her because that fact is, she doesn’t know.

I sigh. It was only a matter of time. But Jesus. I had asked her not to leave the house.

“I don’t understand.”

There’s already banging at the door.

“You haven’t recieved an uplink in over ten years,” I tell her, caressing her perfect cheek with my finger. “You were recalled when the birthrate dropped to almost nothing. You were going to cause our extinction.”

I flinch. The banging’s getting louder.

“But I love you, Terry. I couldn’t let them have you. The house is jammed, Ter. They couldn’t find you there.”

Her expression changes from confusion to a horrible understanding.

“I won’t let them kill you,” she says. They’re nearly through the door when she gives herself up to them. She is almost immediatly destroyed and just the sound of it kills me a little inside.

See, she doesn’t know that without her, I don’t want to be alive either.