Participants:
| Scene Title | Fragility |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Hana reflects on death and what it means if she, too, dies. |
| Date | November 19, 2010 |
Primatech Paper Facility, Staten Island
The burned-out husk of a building long abandoned reveals no light to the outside world, for there is no light to show. Only the wan glow of a single computer monitor, three basement levels below the ground floor, where it cannot filter out. A light as unheeded as the instrument which casts it.
Hana Gitelman kneels on a thinly padded mat, hands folded over her thighs, eyes closed against the slight illumination. Her attention is not on the room, Spartan as it is; not even upon the computer, whose display shows a meaningless babble of symbols in myriad colors, shifting and rotating in aggregate as if they describe something too large for the monitor to easily portray whole. It could be a screensaver.
It isn't anything so simple, but the outward expression of a visualization that lets Hana conceive the pieces of a construct which itself is anything but simple. Even in fragments.
It's an impossible task, like spinning straw into gold or picking up every grain of rice from a bag scattered about the kitchen, but it's a task Hana has set herself, and she confronts it with determined resolve.
I will fix what has been done.
What I have done.
She pores over the code which represents a small part of the entity once named Rebel, looking for anything that seems wrong, anything that is corrupted, any artifacts of either virus. The first pass is easy, relatively speaking; but as for getting it all…
And this is only one piece of many. Seven hundred and thirty-nine.
Purusha aren't supposed to die.
Hana had said it herself — Rebel is data, data is fragile. Data can be corrupted; data can be destroyed. But he was already dead; a spirit excarnate, a pure being. Even though she designed it, cobbled together the code, executed his destruction… He was never supposed to have to die.
You were never supposed to leave me alone.
Flesh is fragile.
What if I die?
Data is fragile.
What if I'm the last?
Angels are fragile.
Who will remember you? a granddaughter asks the memory of her grandmother, even as she painstakingly cleanses the virtual burial shroud of that grandmother's son.
Who will honor you? a daughter asks the memory of her beloved, long-dead mother, remembering glimpses of the past shared between a niece and uncle who never met while alive.
All that I have done.
All that I have preserved.
All that I have broken.
Am I a fitting end to your legacy?
She speaks to angels who hear, but do not listen. Who know, but in their knowing, do not care.
No answer is forthcoming from above.
Yet within, inspiration gathers; gathering, crystallizes into resolve.
First, she has to track down Bennet.
