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THE SUNSET
* 14 *
In the days and weeks following Unicorn's death, Helios' death, and then Aaron's death, Hitchhiker found himself staring up at the same rusty patches and bolt patterns in the ceiling of his quarters. The vibrations of the hover-pod engines generating a soothing hum, he began counting the bolts, starting in the upper-left corner... 1, 2, 3...
He sympathized with Miriam's loss, the loss of her twin brother... She was promised that he would never be separated from her... and that promise was broken... and he tried to imagine the loss of her forearm...
He remembered how Miriam flew from the depths of silence and sadness to the heights of hysteria and madness... But those episodes have gradually faded...
Pain faded over time...
Hitchhiker started over again, going back to the upper-left corner of the ceiling, counting the bolts... 1, 2, 3...
He learned more about the siblings and their connection to the glitch-fire and the exit-fire... It became more evident that the intense energy of fire in such an ancient tenth-century virtuality, over time, interacted negatively with their re-imaged deformities...
In the presence of fire, they could reawaken... and in their awakened presence, the glitch-fire or exit-fire could grow... But without their presence, the cycles were broken...
Even their marks of the Matrix generated the sensation of fire...
Hitchhiker started over again... 1, 2, 3...
He smiled at the thought of Million and her full recovery... She was back to her magical self... And Threads was as feisty and theoretical as ever...
As for himself...
Soon, he would be meeting the new captain...
Hitchhiker finally found the file named 'Snapshot' that Unicorn theorized was a new training program... But it wasn't a training program... It was a simple program... a simple snapshot of his mother and father relaxing on the beach... during a sunset...
The one thing they missed most in the Matrix was the sunset...
In fact, that was a good idea... to relax on the beach during a sunset... Or in his case, to watch it on the displays of his operator station... Wearily, he rose from his cot, swung open and shut the door to his quarters, and ambled towards the operator station...
And Senior Operator Hitchhiker of the ninety-year-old hovercraft 'Nosferatu' readjusted the creased bill of his father's worn-and-torn orange cap, flipping it up then back down on his head.
END
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