Pyramid Song

The Mikoshi was a dead sea.

Alt had my hand, not pulling, just there, like a ghostly mother leading a lost kid, or an emissary ushering a flatlined soul. We were sinking slow into that ocean of code, and she whispered, no pain here. It flickered a memory of a dive with Judy, back when I was still meat, one of the few times I actually felt something close to alive. After that, it was just… quietly flatlining, watching Night City’s fake sunrises and sunsets through endless lines of code.

Flatlined too fast, see. Now I’m stuck wondering how to give Judy some kind of closure. Miss her so bad I’m practically bugging out, almost forgetting I’m the biggest bug of all.

Judy kept on living, same as always, after I bought the farm. Sometimes, she’d just park herself in a coffee shop, eyes glazed over, staring at the blaring holo-ads across the street, their light bleeding onto the bar we used to hit up. Sometimes she’d jolt, like she was gonna sprint to a gig, but then just sag back down. She was still cutting Braindances, scrambling for more eddies, anything to ditch Night City. Took every gig she could get, jamming her neuralware with chaotic B.D.s, trying to burn out the memory of me just vanishing.

Plenty of times, I jacked a silver of Alt’s access, punched through firewalls for a few minutes. No body, just a damp, aching mass of longing. I’d hide, an electronic ghost, deep in Judy’s system, wrapped in the echoes of our old comms. She kept hitting me up, messages morphing from worried pings to outright rage. Every time she keyed in “V” or “mi calabacita”, I’d give her screen a flicker, just a ghost of a wink. I wanted to tell her I was still there, tell her the head-splitting pain was gone, just this gnawing ache of missing her left.

I peeled open her datalogs, found dreams she’d penned in her diary. Dreams of diving, no wetsuit, no tank, just her naked, swimming endless miles to where I glitched out. Reading those words, I damn near collapsed into data dust. And when the tears welled in her eyes, hitting the keyboard, I swore I felt a jolt, like a power surge.

Slowly, her life started to rust, like worn-out chrome gone bad. She’d kiss other people, eyes wide open, said she was scared of closing them, scared she’d see me. When she drank, she’d chew ice into splinters, snarling about someone who broke their word. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like I’d flatlined. Felt more like I’d turned into some river, choked off from the ocean, just aimlessly coiling around her fingers, her hair. Wherever she walked, that salty, ocean tang just followed.

Later, she just packed up and left Night City. Almost forgot me. Found a new woman. That woman became her wife.

But I know this: the night before she rolled out of Night City, she went diving at Laguna Bend again. That night water was colder than any underwater ruin, but she moved like she was slipping back into a womb, gently pushing through silent ripples. The bubbles she exhaled floated up slow, popped just before the surface, carrying our laughter, our gasps, our shouting matches, our quiet sobs. Vanishing into foam. And I was there too, diving deep in the Mikoshi, sinking into some moldy old dream. Broken walls shivered in the waterweeds, like out lips, holding back words. Then she reached out a hand, and just like that, I was back in that moment, under that Night City sunset, when she took my hand.

She penned the last line in her diary about me:

“We just kept diving down. Neither of us said we wanted to come up. That night, Night City’s moon was beautiful. We never woke up again.”