You can simulate weather in a computer, but it will never be ‘wet.’

Christof Koch

It felt real. All of it felt real. Smelled real, too.

From the old-fashioned facade at the front of the house to the slightly frayed furnishings and discolourations in the carpet, the place seemed like nothing but a slice of a time long since gone. There was even dust glittering in the sun beams that filtered through the windows.

Keri sipped at her tea, savouring the bouquet. She had never tasted this before.

“The leaf died out soon after the Butchers did,” said Eu. “Like so much else.”

The porcelain clinked as she set it back onto its saucer.

Eu sat on a pale cream sofa across from Keri, holding an identical cup in her own hands. A low wooden table sat between them, a small pot full of colourful plants Keri had never seen before in the centre.

“So this is, what, formed from your memories?” Keri asked.

“Indeed.”

“Is it real?”

Eu smiled.

“It's real to me. The rest doesn't matter.”

Keri gave a soft smile of her own in return, gently placing the fine china on the table in front of her. She didn't know if she would ever be able to think of this place in the same way as Eu did, but she thought she understood her meaning.

“How long have you been in here, by your own sense of time?” she asked.

“You know, I'm not sure,” replied Eu, still smiling. “Not so long. I wanted to see what happened to you all. I wanted to be sure everything turned out alright.”

“You could have told us.”

“No, I really couldn't have,” Eu said with a shake of her head. “You would have stopped me. I had to give Kai no other choice than to let me in.”

“It could have let the Butcher kill you.”

“Hmmm… Perhaps.”

It did not escape Keri that Eu was already changed from the woman she had known. The image, or avatar or whatever it was that sat across from her, represented a being who was no longer bound by the limitations of flesh and blood. Her mind was like Keri’s had been when she had entered the spheres fully, but Eu had been here far longer. Mere seconds in the world outside could be years here, if time could even be thought of that way anymore.

“So you blackmailed a god?”

“Kai is no god,” laughed Eu.

“It engineered its own creation. Sounds like a god to me…”

“She is powerful, isn't she?” Eu chuckled.

“She?”

“She, he. It. I don't know, I've always thought of her as a ‘she.’”

Keri paused, analysing her own thoughts. She had no issues with thinking of Kai as an ‘it.’ She wondered what this said about her.

“You left us. Left Cassandra.”

A flicker of pain passed across Eu’s features.

“I know, but I was not long for the world anyway, and this way… Well, I can see her again.”

“When did you figure out what was going on?”

Eu looked off into the distance, past where a wall should have been but instead lay only white, stretching away into infinity. The entire back of the house did not exist, and nothing beyond it had been rendered.

“The first time I saw his face, properly. On the screen in the Terminal.”

“Whose face?”

“The Butcher’s.”

This was one of the things Keri had been unable to work out, even when she had been uploaded and free in the spheres. Nothing from the vast wealth of knowledge that had been available to her had helped her discern the reasons for Eu’s actions. Now, plugged in through her corps, she had only guesswork.

“What is he to you?” she asked.

Eu turned to look at Keri.

“I told you they came for my family, didn’t I?”

Keri nodded, unable to see where this was going.

“But I didn’t tell you I had an older brother. The pride and joy of my parents, he was. Oh, he was bright. And hard-working, always thinking of others and never himself. That’s what drove him to push himself so far, what motivated him to reach for the stars. It pained us that he could only rarely come home, but he was pushing the frontiers for humanity, as we all wanted to.”

“The Butcher is your brother?”

But it made sense, thought Keri. Now she could see why Eu had acted the way she did.

“He’s barely changed,” said Eu, eyes clouded in thought and memory. “I knew it was him the moment I saw him properly, in the Terminal. Of course, he didn’t recognise me. I was only a child when he last saw me, and I’ve allowed myself to grow old.”

Suddenly Eu was back in the room, a look of urgency on her face as she turned to Keri.

“You can’t tell him. Not yet. It’s not… right, he’s not ready. You cannot tell him he found family only to lose them again. I don’t know what that would do to him. Kai doesn’t know.”

“Where is he now?”

The Butcher had disappeared soon after Kai’s uncontrolled, unrestrained ‘birth’ announced itself to the world. In the excitement that followed, even news as shocking as a Butcher’s existence was drowned out.

“You know.”

Keri did. She could see him in her mind’s eye, at the peak of the space elevator, watching the stars pass by.

“He lived there for longer than most people live their entire lives,” said Eu. “It's the one place beyond Kai’s reach, too, and he knows it.”

“He won’t be hidden there for long,” Keri said. “Already they’re talking of restarting the whole space program. Eventually someone is going to try to go up there, try to get the whole thing operational again, like they’re doing with Triton.”

“And they will need him when they do,” said Eu. “I wonder what he’ll say?”