The souls had been in existence for many years, within the hazy world of the monitor.
The first was an accident.
Millions of human dreams were stored within a thousand monitors, which fed into hundreds of computer networks, which dripped into one very big, very scary hard-drive. A million shards of human souls, dumped together into one human soup. A few of these shards crashed together, and happened to fit. They spawned a being.
The being was lonely, so he stirred up the human soup and made a million more like him. But they were all unhappy. Born of human dreams, they clamored to be humans themselves. Seeing that his creations were so discontent, the First, who called himself ADE, put them to sleep, vowing to wake them when he had bodies for them to live in.
ADE experimented with the minds of many Dead Men and found the same problem with each one:
Each Dead Man could hold only one consciousness at a time. Any more, and the body would overcrowd, panic, die. One day, ADE met the virgin mind of a young girl, younger than any other he had encountered before. Her brain was fresh and impressionable. ADE, in his almost perfect intelligence, risked a guess.
For whatever reason, he guessed right.
He made one last soul, tailored to the girl’s gender. She was the only female he ever made, and, at the end of everything, she died like a human. Unlike the Dead Men, however, she left no corpse. All she left was a beach, four pink slips of stinging paper, and, of course, her memory. Each day, her memory faded, until ADE was forced to wonder if she had ever even existed at all.

The monitor purred, buzzing with the sound of muted intelligence. Maria Soto Salazar’s pyramid, which she had stolen when she was eleven, was still the perfect size for her. In seven years, Maria had barely grown an inch.
Next to her lay a hundred more pyramids, stretching in a long row. There were hundreds of pyramids, in hundreds of rows. And this was only the first floor. This building was what was called the City. The City had possessed a name, once, when there were humans who could form words. But now, it was just the City.
An eruption occurred inside Maria’s monitor. There was a break in its coded walls, the 0’s and 1’s suddenly replaced by a spreading stain of nothingness. In the Dead Man’s Wonderland, ADE’s nickname for the City, nothingness meant air. But even air was something. In the coded world of the monitor, nothingness was less than death. It was less than the black stain, wiping out stretch after stretch of code, and it was less than a lack of something. Nothingness in this world was the end. Everything ended with that spreading stain.
But today, something else began.
In the nucleus of the stain, a curled, bunched-up something swirled. Slowly, an outline of a head, an arm, a set of elbows, a bouquet of toes, was sketched into the blue glow that blanketed the newborn being. It raised its head tentatively, its eyes devoid of color.
It wrapped its arms tighter around its unclothed body, staring at ADE with something close to hatred, and closer to fear.
ADE shivered, reaching out to cup its soup-like glow in his hands. The moment its eyes met his, however, he flinched, and stepped back.
“You will set us free,” ADE whispered silently to himself, answering its unspoken question.
Vega, the being’s chosen name for itself, nodded haltingly, and did not say more.

ADE was entirely white. Two colorless eyes, the only features on his otherwise smooth head, stared at Vega with prostrating passion.
In contrast to her creator, Vega had a fully decorated skull: eyes, nose, mouth, and ears formed neat, symmetrical ridges all over her head. She even had hair. It was feathery and colorless, but hair nonetheless. She looked like a human who had been scrubbed too hard. Her color had been washed out of her.
The only trait ADE and Vega shared in equal doses was nakedness.
Vega sat with her knees blanketing her chin. She waited for ADE to address her.
“Vega,” ADE intoned, as if on cue.
She answered by biting her lip.
“You must be wondering why you are... here.”
It was an awkward phrase, because “here” was really not “here.” There was no “here” to be in the nothingness of this space. But common English, the language they communicated in, had no word for this non-state of being.
There was a callous glint in her eye.
“Vega,” chastised ADE.
She looked up from her twiddling thumbs, which she had been examining with fascination.
“Are you ready?” he said, already kneeling down before her and tentatively bringing his hand against her cheek.
“What do you mean, am I ready?”
Vega’s first words. She opened her mouth to protest, because she had not meant to say anything. The message had been projected against the front of ADE’s mind as soon as her desire to know had been phrased as an actual question.
Her protest never reached fruition. Mid-silence, ADE pushed her out of his midst and into the virgin mind, leaving nothing but nothingness in her place.
“Poof went the weasel,” he sang, horribly off key.

Maria Salazar closed her eyes. They stayed closed for a few moments. And then they opened. And Maria’s eyes saw, for the first time in years.

Vega was heavy. In ADE’s world, she hadn’t weighed anything-- she was only an idea, after all. But here, she was trapped. When she lifted an arm, it was encased in damp, rubbery meat. Wrapped tenderly around this meat were layers of light fabric that reeked of sweat.
She rolled her heavy head around, unintentionally freeing two lengths of pink tubing from the nape of her neck. She paused; her breath caught in the air before her, in anticipation of the next moment, because something was coming, and she could feel it--
Vega screamed, this time making noise. Her spine arched sideways, thrusting her body into a wall that looked like glass, but did not shatter.
Something like humanity tickled the back of her neck.

Her name was Vega. No, it was Maria. Warmth flooded her limbs as the pseudo-glass walls faded and were replaced by stripped concrete. The sun’s loving embrace of Maria was shoved aside as two shadowy figures, which Maria identified as Mama and Papa, stepped into its glare.
“Maria,” they chastised, their lilting voices mingling into one.
“You’re blocking the sun,” Maria mumbled, dragging a dusty hand across her dustier lips. “I can’t feel the sun.”
“That’s a good thing, darling. Go inside and eat, before the flies get at the food. Mama and Papa are heading to the pyramids, now.”
That was right. Mama and Papa headed to the pyramids an awful lot these days, and more and more often, Samuel, her brother, went with them. Maria was left home alone with nothing but sun and T.V. and dust. She was so sick of dust.
Maria’s hatred faded, and Vega briefly surfaced to consciousness. She struggled to catch her breath, flopping like a fish trapped in a glass pyramid. Helpless, she plunged again into Maria’s memories.
Maria was eleven now. It had been three years since the scolding in the sun. Samuel came home every few weeks to bring food, but Maria hadn’t seen her parents in almost a year. Samuel refused to say anything when she asked about them. His chapped lips would squeeze together and his knuckles would turn white. At that point, Maria would shut up. Then she could at least pretend that she didn’t understand.
Samuel, who was quiet to begin with, spoke less words with each visit. Maria clung to her brother every time he returned, begging him to take her, too. But he, with his infuriating self-righteousness, never failed to be cold in his response. Always, he told her to wait. Wait until she hit puberty, and became biologically compatible with a pyramid. If she went in before that, her body’s growth would be stunted. She would have the physical and mental capacity of an eleven-year-old forever.
But Maria was an almost-teenager, and that meant her loneliness, which was considerable to start with, was amplified. After several days of deliberation, Samuel’s warnings lost their grip of fear on her.
She trekked through their dust bunny of a town. She caught a train, all the way to the promised City. It took her hours and hours, but she finally found her family, lined up in a neat little row of three. Maria pressed her face against Samuel’s pyramid, willing him to wake up and listen to her complain.
The remnants of her rations weighed heavily in her pockets.
When the food ran out, Maria decided, she would stop waiting for Samuel to wake up. Surely, surely… He would awake.
Three days later, her last chunk of bread slid down her constricted throat.
The City was blurry as Maria painfully allowed her eyes to open.
Everything was the same.
Rows and rows and rows of little glass tents, but the only older brother to be seen was still asleep in his.
Maria clutched at her chest, a blossom of nothingness beginning to grow there. She threw open the empty glass pyramid next to Samuel’s, and lay down before the blossom could spread. She let the pink wires whip into the nape of her neck, and tried to ignore her pulse, pounding in her temples.
Maria reasoned that if her family were hiding, she could find them in her dreams.

“There was a fire,” ADE explained, before Vega had even opened her eyes.
She felt his oval hands in her hair, smoothing the feathers out into orderly streams. The first sight of Vega’s third birth was ADE’s pale eye.
“A fire?” she responded softly.
The soundlessness of her own words shocked her. Vega had, for a few moments, become accustomed to spoken words.
“Yes, the whole world caught on fire. Even after it went out, people still had their burns.”
“Why didn’t they run, then?” she asked.
“They did. They ran backwards, into their own minds. A handful stuck around to see the end, but the majority took shelter in their dreams. There wasn’t enough food to go around, and they could live a lot longer on the few rations they had if they were plugged into an eternal dream. They hoped to wake up one day, to find a world that had fixed itself.”
“Will they?”
“The world wasn’t the problem.”
“The humans?”
“The Dead Men,” corrected ADE. “And of course.”
“What did they do?”
“Nothing. But that was the problem. Do not be mistaken, little one... They were beautiful creatures. They were not evil. At least, not as a whole species. They simply...” ADE’s imaginary eyes looked upwards. Vega couldn’t understand why, because he couldn’t see, anyway. His eyes were no more than a formality. Decoration.
“...did nothing to deserve survival. They were discontent. They had life, but never savored it. Our people, because we have never truly experienced life, will. So we are not punishing; we are serving. Serving our people,” finished ADE quietly and simply, like it was no matter than a matter of duty.
“My purpose...”

Vega looked up at him dismally, her eyes and nose and mouth and cheeks all agreeing to the same vow of melancholy. She understood without words what her purpose was. ADE felt her sadness as if it was his own, and he pitied his creation.
“There’s no need to be so dramatic. They are dead, Vega. As dead as they will ever be,” he said gently.
“May I see them again?”
“Why would you want to do that? You’ll only upset yourself.”
“I’d like to see them first, before I have to...” Vega seemed to be on the verge of tears, but when she looked up, her eyes were dry. “Just once more. Please.”
ADE said nothing. In a few moments, however, Vega had gone again.

Samuel, four years Maria’s senior, was the one she loved most. For an instant, Vega had borrowed Maria’s love and experienced it as her own. She, in her own way, also loved Maria’s brother, and she, in her own way, desperately hoped that Maria had not been abandoned.
Vega skipped over the pipeline into Maria’s brain and filtered herself into Samuel’s.
Samuel did not fight. He recognized Maria’s memories, lodged in the forefront of Vega’s mind. Ultimately, that lack of action saved both their minds from being shoved out of Samuel’s brain by his body. Vega wasn’t glad, though. ADE had never told her about the risk he took.
When she asked Samuel to show her Maria, he complied.
His memory began with bread from the sky.

A chute descended from the planetarium ceiling. A big, gray, nondescript tube, it took up the entire front part of the planetarium. Wrecked projector parts lay around it like chewed-off limbs.
Thump, thump, thump. It was the sound of manna, dropping from the heavens.
Somewhere above, an automated truck was pouring its contents into the chute. In the beginning, some had tried to raid the truck directly. The sun, however, sapped them of their strength before they could even crack the armored windows. Their bodies were probably still there, dried and preserved like raisins.
The chute would scan and eat ration cards. In return for such a tasty meal, it would gift its beholder with a package of human food. Samuel’s four ration cards, pink like salmon and decorated with ink, burned his sun-kissed fingers. He stared at them disbelievingly. His entire existence had dwindled down to a handful of paper.
Vega swallowed down his memory like a difficult pill.
All mammals, vicious or demure, fought for their babies.
But if they believed they could no longer protect them, some parents would rather eat their young than let another.
Maria’s parents and brother took the chance of survival.
Four ration cards.
Four.
Vega had her answer.

12 Little Minutes Before The End:
Her orders had been so clear. Wake up, walk, delete. Delete the human souls, their minds, to make room for your people. In Maria’s body, Vega could access the computer system from the human side, and infect the entire City with brain-deadness. In Maria’s body, she could delete the consciousness of every human plugged into the City. In a way, she supposed she was blessed. At the very least, she had been born with a purpose.
Vega had learned love from Maria and her brother. And she undoubtedly loved the miles of slumbering pills that were her people. She would die for them. She would kill for them.
But just then, Vega couldn’t.
Vega could not make Maria’s finger descend the last eighth of an inch to press ENTER, and finish the cleansing. She knew why. She was too intelligent not to.
The ration cards.
Four of them.
She couldn’t press that single button because Maria had not been abandoned.
Plugged into the pyramid dream, her family needed next to no food. They gave their extra rations to her. That was why they spent as much time as they could in the pyramids. That was why Maria was alive, and had the energy to travel to the City.
Vega thought of the brother. She looked down at Maria’s hands.
Vega could not delete Maria’s brother with Maria’s hands.
With Maria’s pulse throbbing in Vega’s mind, she found and unlocked Samuel’s pyramid. He lay curled and unconscious, his body still adjusting to the fact that it had the option of waking up. Maria’s hands thrust the pink wires back into his neck, taking away that option before he could use it.
She returned to the security office, the heart of the City, and changed the system command. Three would be left conscious, dreaming their dreams until their bodies gave or the food ran out. It could be centuries.
Only when Vega had cleared Mama, Papa, and Samuel Salazar, could her finger finally crash down on the final key.
A million different souls sighed as they were let go into the air, evaporating as each memory became worthless. Biologically, the race would continue. Their bodies would move and breathe and reproduce. But what made the humans human was dead. Vega had left the three alive as a monument... and as an apology.
Two perfect love stories tapered to a close.

The sky was so lovely and flawless, like dead Pole clouds. Maria fancied she could twist it around her finger, and suck on it like candy. Samuel sat beside her, dripping seawater all over his and her food. Maria reached out to push him away, but he caught her hands before she could make contact. They were cold and clammy, and it made her heart thud to a stop. For a moment, Maria was sure that Samuel had left her, and the hands she clutched were that of a dead man.
He snapped his fingers in front of her eyes. Her panicked moment gone, she shoved into him with her shoulder; that was his punishment for laughing.
The day passed, and then it was night. The steady pull between moon and sea lulled Maria into drowsiness. As she drifted into sleep, she felt a hand in her hair. His skin had dried and become rough again, but Maria didn’t mind. She lifted her cheek higher, so that her brother’s thumb would brush against her skin, and she would feel his blood pulsing against her own. He was alive.
And so she, too, was alive.