Re: 'delivery'
[This is the bottle she used. Uses. He opens the box and pulls the bottle out, looks at the level, the age. This is someone from the old days. How long ago? If this individual wanted to kill him, if they wanted to bring him back to the fold, they had their opportunities already and they let them go. But he dislikes playing games these days, following rules.
Still, this feels important. Opening the bottle and smelling the perfume, thin and mellowed with age, creates a slow pulse in the pit of his stomach.]
I know she has red hair. I know she loved the ballet, but the ballet...wasn't real. [It doesn't make sense, but he feels it's right.] She had a- [Mission is on the tip of his tongue, but he abandons it.] purpose. As did I. They didn't include each other.
[What was the shape of her face? What did she smell like under the perfume? What was her name? Were they lovers?]
I didn't want to leave her. [There is a memory with that, but it isn't much. It's one in a series of hundreds - electrodes at the temples, still a very early version of the more powerful machine they later constructed. Seeing white, seeing nothing, being nothing, and clinging to things that quickly ceased to be important, and then ceased to exist. What he was, what other people were. Gone. He remembers, this time, trying to hold on to even a tiny piece of what they would inevitably, irrevocably take away. Even a fragment - but not even that could be permitted. He might have even said her name, but his tongue doesn't know it anymore.
He screws the cap back on the perfume.] She's still a secret.