I think I knew deep down that what I was planning was crazy, maybe even insane; hell, it definitely wasn’t legal. I obviously had doubts on whether or not it would actually work, but at that point I had to at least try. The alternative wasn’t a pleasant thought. I had the research to hypothetically make it work, and it did work… but that was the problem. I’m getting ahead of myself aren’t I? I guess in order for you to understand my end, I need to start at the beginning. For me, my beginning was when I met her; Youngji.

She was a splash of color in my grey life. The only thing that mattered before her was my research and my job. I had no family, as my parents died when I was a teenager, and the only joy I felt came whenever I did something others deemed “impossible”. As a Robotics Engineer, there were countless things that people told me just wouldn’t work. A robot that could clean your house? Ridiculous! I did it anyway. A car that could drive itself in any city? Preposterous! Not for me. A working robot that looks like a person? Absurd! It was difficult, but not impossible. When I was making the human robot, or “android” as the government wanted me to call it, a thought went through my mind; What if I could transfer my consciousness from my own body to this android? Not in the Girl Who was Plugged In kind of way. No, I was thinking more along the lines of leaving my own body behind and taking form in the ’droid. It was during my research period of this thesis that I met Youngji.

Youngji was just hired at the government building I worked in. She was the new receptionist and I had no choice but to see her every time I walked past the front door. The role of receptionist was only a formality though; altogether there were about six of us working in the building, including her. The only reason she needed to be there was to keep a tab on where we were in case we got a surprise visit from the secret service. A bunch of scientists with the capacity to build anything from something harmless, to something atomic called for a visit once in a while. Since I started working there, only one person was ever taken away by them. I think his name was… Sven? Ben? Something along those lines anyway. His mistake was thinking he could secretly make a condensed atom bomb and sell it on the deep web, triple what the government would pay for. They swooped in on him like an eagle on a rabbit. He didn’t stand a chance but he didn’t go down quietly either. He kept shouting at them that what he did with his work was his business and they had no right to throw him in jail. Idiot. He didn’t realize that without their funding and their equipment, he would have never had the means to create it in the first place, but I digress.

Youngji had this warmth in her that even the other scientists seemed to be attracted to. Since we didn’t receive very many calls or visitors, Youngji would go around to everyone’s work areas and offer them tea or coffee; sometimes she came to my area just to chat, saying that I needed to take a break from my work before I went insane. This was how our relationship started. Most of the time we would talk about the weather, recent events in the news; sometimes she would ask me what I was working on, but I could only tell her a little bit since it was a secret project. One day she came by and asked me what I planned to do after work. I looked at her and shrugged my shoulders.

“I don’t know. Probably just go over my reports. I’m so close to finding out how to insert a person’s entire memory into a computer system, and when that’s done I’ll be one step closer to finishing the research portion of my thesis.”

“As riveting as that sounds, how about we go to a movie together? A bunch of the others are coming too!”

I looked at her like she was crazy. Why would I waste my time at the movie theatre, when I had more pressing matters to deal with? She matched my look with a glare, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Hongbin Lee, I don’t care how close you say you are to cracking your… whatever it is you’re doing, but you told me the exact same thing last week when the rest of us went out for Sora’s birthday dinner! You’re coming tonight, even if I have to drag you by the ear!”

Before I could answer, she her heels and left my work area. To be honest, I was surprised at her little outburst. She was usually so easy going and cheerful; it was strange to see her being so… stubborn. I don’t know if that’s what made me go to the gathering, but I did decide to go in the end. She looked a little sheepish when I arrived; she told me that the others had cancelled and it would be just the two of us. I still don’t know if she had planned this or not. All I know is that we started going out to different places after that. We started dating about a month later.

I’ll admit that, because of her, my research took longer than it normally would have. She would come into my work space and pull on my arm or pout until I gave her my attention. She hated the long hours I worked and would always try and make me take the breaks she said I needed. As annoying as I thought her constant interruptions were at first, she always looked adorable doing them. She did help me in one way though; she agreed to let me scan her memories regularly in order to perfect my machine. She had me wrapped around her finger though, so much so that even the other scientists noticed. Slowly, but surely, she started to take me past my work and show me the beauty in a flower; the awe of a thunderstorm; the music in the rain. Most importantly, she showed me the power of the connection from one human to another.

We dated for about a year and I wanted so badly to start a life with her. My research was almost complete; the money I would get from this breakthrough would be enough for me to retire thirty years early, and live comfortably for the rest of my life. Apparently the government was willing to pay top dollar in order to create the “perfect soldier”, and felt that my research was a step in that direction. At this point, I just wanted to finish it. For the first time in a long time, it felt like there was more to my life than constantly working like a drone in a hive. That’s when we got the bad news. Youngji was dying.

Youngji had been born with a weak immune system and she had to take ten different pills a day. She also had to wash her hands and wear a mask to the office, especially when the weather changed. As far as medical sciences had come, there was still no cure for hereditary diseases. The worst thing for her to catch was the flu and every time she got it, her life was on the line. This time she caught a string of the virus that had grown immune to modern immunizations. Usually a normal person could have fought it off, but for Youngji it was a death sentence.

I stayed with her the whole time, hoping and praying they would find a way to save her. I watched as the woman that was the color in my world, slowly became as grey and bleak as the world had once looked to me. Even through all of this, she kept a smile on her face and made me promise that, whatever happened to her, I would never go back to how I was. She also made me scan her memories one last time so I would always have something of her with me. She said she hoped one day I would be able to actually see the memories and see how much I meant to her. She died the next day… and I was holding her hand when the light her eyes was extinguished.

To say I was a wreck after that day would be an understatement. I didn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep; everywhere I went, every sound I heard reminded me of her. I missed her more and more with each passing day, and I soon realized I couldn’t hear the music in the rain anymore. The first day I went to work was excruciating. I would be sitting at my desk and I swear I’d feel her hand on my arm, or hear her humming behind me. Every time someone walked by my work area I expected to see her waltz in. I couldn’t take all the reminders and I finally broke down. As I sat there crying my eyes out, an idea started to form in my mind; the first of two insane ideas I had. If it was too difficult to live without her, what if I erased my memory of her so that I never knew her in the first place?

I got to work immediately. I had made an android that looked like me a few years ago. It was fully functional as long as you had a program installed into it that would make it move and do what you wanted. The difference would be that I was going to be the program. I didn’t know if it would work and I didn’t know if I would even live through it. However, I was in the final stretch of my thesis and this would be what proved or disproved it. I went straight to my scanner and did a quick scan of my brain’s memories so that I could begin editing what would go into my ‘droid self, and what would remain in my leftover human body. As soon as I was done, I called one of the scientists over to come and supervise and “flip the switch” so to speak. This was the most dangerous part. I would have to hook up my android and myself to my computer. The computer would then slowly take my consciousness away and put it inside the android. I had done this numerous times with rats and rabbits, but never on a human. Today was as good a day as any to try it out.

One minute I was breathing slowly and evenly, descending into what felt like sleep, only to open my eyes in a totally new body. As I planned, I had no recollection of Youngji whatsoever, and my first thought was to call headquarters to let them know about my discovery. The next few months were the busiest I thought I’d been in the last year. I spent that time transferring countless people into different androids that either looked like them, or looked like the ideal soldier. However, the whole time I was doing that, I kept getting these… glitches in my sight. It wasn’t a glitch in my sight, more like I was reliving different moments like a short film clip in my mind. These clips would always be of me with Youngji. It wasn’t too long before I started piecing together what happened to me. The pain started to come back and that’s when the second crazy idea happened.

You see, I felt like I was cheated by both death and time. The first time was when my parents died and then it happened again with Youngji. Death had taken away the time I got to spend with the people I loved most in my life. I felt like now was a good time to cheat death and take back the time I was stripped of with at least one of them. It would be easier to transfer memories instead of transferring full blown consciousness into an android. The only problem with my plan was that headquarters didn’t agree with it. When I met with the head scientist, she simply looked at me with pity.

“Dr. Lee,” she said. “It’s one thing to make a living person an android; it’s another thing entirely to bring someone back from the grave. There are too many people on this planet as it is! Can you imagine if no one ever truly died? Can you fathom how the religious leaders would riot? That’s a chance we’re not willing to take at this time. In all honesty, although I do understand your pain, if you did bring her back she would never be the girl you fell in love with. She’d simply be a hollow echo of who she was. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can move on and possibly find someone else.”

In my mind, this wasn’t up for debate. It didn’t matter what she said to me or what anyone else thought. One way or another, I was going to get Youngji back. It took a while to gather the necessary materials to make an android. When I finally had everything, I started going to my work space afterhours to work on her. As she started to look more and more like Youngji, the clips started coming up more often. Most of the clips I started to see were of the times around her death and the time afterwards. They didn’t hurt me as much as they might have though; I knew that she would be with me soon.

The time finally came for me to test out the android itself. I uploaded a simple program into her that would make her walk and blink. It would be enough to sneak her out of the building and to my house where I had her memories stored in a system. When she opened her eyes I felt my heart skip a beat. Youngji was alive, in front of me.  I felt my face scrunch up like it would when I was about to cry but no tears came. I reached out to her and placed my hand on her face. However, the moment she looked at me, I knew that she wasn’t complete yet. Her eyes reminded me of a fish. Dead, empty, and void of emotion. I grabbed her hand and led her out into the parking lot to my vehicle. When we reached my place, I noticed that there was a slight burning smell in the air. I looked over at Youngji and noticed that her arm was starting to glow. I hurried her inside to take her arm off and inspect it. Turns out it was just a slight short circuit from some cheap wire I bought off of the internet. I was glad I had some good quality stuff in my place that I could use to patch her up.

I led her into my place and had her sit down on my bed as I worked on her arm and booted up the system with her memories. She continued to stare straight at the wall. After I was done fixing her arm, I moved her to a chair by the memory importer where I reattached her arm. I finally placed the memory helmet over her head and started the import. I honestly don’t know how long it took; it could have been an hour or even two minutes, but the whole time it was happening, I held my breath. The beeping of the machine reminded me of the final day I spent with her, listening to the heart monitor wondering when it would beep for the last time.

The machine beeped three times signifying that the memory insertion was complete. I slowly took the helmet off of her and saw her with her eyes closed. She shook her head slightly and looked up at me. I saw her eyes come back to life just as I had watched them fade. The next thing I knew, she jumped up and hugged me.

“Hongbin…” she whispered. Her voice sounded like she was going to cry. She tightened her hold on me and I did the same. I felt my face scrunch up again. I did it. After so long I finally got what I was longing for since I lost her; I was able to hold her in my arms, and this time I never had to say goodbye again.

We let go of each other and we stared into each other’s eyes. I rested my forehead on hers and smiled at her. She smiled as well as she rubbed her nose against mine. She grabbed my hand and led me to the bed where we sat and talked about what happened since she was last alive. The whole time we talked, we held hands and once in a while she would lean her head on me. I couldn’t stop looking at her and found myself touching her face over and over again, to make sure she was actually there and not just one of the clips. That’s when I heard the front door open, and saw the secret service agents come in.

I stood up and Youngji did the same. I pushed her behind me in hopes of protecting her, but two of the agents grabbed me while the other two grabbed Youngji, trying to take her away. She struggled against them, calling my name. I flung the agents holding me off and ran to Youngji. I pushed the other two as hard as I could away from her and ran straight for the exit toward my car. Youngji held onto my hand and kept up with me the whole time. When we got into the car and started driving, she turned to me.

“What do we do now?” she asked, a tremble in her voice.

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “All I know for sure is that I need to go back to my office and make sure to delete all of my research. They’ll never let me work for them after what I did. They’ll just take my findings and get someone else to continue the research. Hell, they might just destroy me afterwards. Right now I’m just an android that is made up of the parts they provided. There’s probably a tracker in my system somewhere, so even if I run I’ll never be rid of them.”

We continued to drive in silence and we soon reached the building. I pulled up to the front entrance, put my vehicle in park and jumped out. We both ran through the doors, stopping only when we got to my office. I set to work right away, deleting everything on my computers’ systems. Whenever a computer would finish deleting, I got Youngji to tear it apart into tiny pieces. Even if they found a way to recover the deleted data, they would never be able to do anything about it if the computers themselves were destroyed. I gathered up all my paper reports into the center of the room and quickly set it on fire. I turned to Youngji and grabbed her hand before running to another room.

“Hongbin,” she said as we ran down the corridor. “Where are we going?”

I cleared my throat, feeling like there was a lump in it. “You’ll see Youngji. There’s one last thing I have to do.”

We finally made it to the room with the label “Deconstruction” on the door. We went inside and I locked the door behind us. I made sure to smash the keypad so we could buy ourselves a little more time.

“Hongbin, why are we here?” Youngji asked in confusion.

Instead of answering her, I went to the computer and set it to the “Deconstruct: Android” option. The machine whirred to life and the different mechanisms started moving toward the table like thing in the middle of the room. I walked slowly to Youngji, fighting imaginary tears the whole time.

“Youngji,” I said, placing a hand on her face. “Even if I run, they will always find me. If they don’t, they can always find a way to turn my power system off. I can’t do anything outside of this place, but you… I made you myself. You have nothing in you that they will be able to track… I want you to run and-”

“What?!” she shouted, backing away from me in surprise.

“Youngji, please,” I pleaded with her. “You don’t know how much I went through to get you back. When you died I tried to erase you from me, but I couldn’t. You’ll always be with me, no matter what happens.”

There was a sudden pounding on the door. Youngji and I turned to see multiple shadows against the bulletproof glass. I quickly turned back to her and grabbed her hand.

“There’s not much time left,” I said urgently, glancing over my shoulder. “You need to leave and run as far as you can-”

She pressed her lips against mine to get me to stop talking. When she pulled away, she looked like she should be crying.

“No,” she whispered. “I’m not leaving without you. If you couldn’t live without me, how can you expect me to do the same? When I was dying I was so happy that the last thing I was going to see was your face. A world without you isn’t a world I want to live in.”

She buried her face into my chest and sobbed bitterly into my shirt. I held her tightly to me, feeling like I was crying. The sobs and pain were the same, but my eyes remained as dry as before. I pulled away from her and gently lifted her face to look at mine. I gave her the best smile I could muster before planting a quick kiss on her forehead.

“Then,” I said. “Let’s make sure that the last thing either of us sees is the others face…”

She nodded and we both held hands as we headed to the table in the middle of the room.

We both lay here now as the machine takes us apart piece by piece. We can hear the agents trying to break in and hear them yelling from the hall. However, even with everything going on around us, we never once take our eyes away from each other’s. I feel Youngji’s earlier words ring in my ears as we slowly die, me for the first time and her for the second.

“I’m happy,” I whisper. I can hear my voice start to fade in and out as if I am actually dying as a human. “I’m happy that the last thing I get to see is you…”

Youngji smiles sadly and mouths something to me that I can’t hear but can read loud and clear.

“I love you…”

And then everything cuts-*ERR_error_string(connection_lost);