Lots of unreal science and logic ahead

“Cheonsa” I mumble, not even feeling embarrassed about gawking up at him as if I’m seeing him for the first time. He looks amused, his head tilted and a slight smile playing on his lips. I suddenly realize that he might not have understood what I was telling him. The language now is global, it’s English, and all the other languages have long gone into extinction. People in this generation hardly know what our origin is, or whether the obvious difference of our appearance from the rest of the world ever really matters. I feel like an idiot, talking in literally a non-existing language; but then, his smile widens. I can’t figure out the reason for this until he says. “Angel. Yes, I get that a lot”

“You know…?” I ask before I can stop myself. He shakes his head at this, staring ahead, that look of amusement still unfazed in his eyes. “Well, some of us can’t ever forget our roots” He replies.

Silence ensues afterwards, and although I have stopped crying, in courtesy of 1004’s efficacious persuasion, I still have that feeling of emptiness, loneliness gnawing on my insides like devious parasites. Yet, I have no idea how I must approach this problem. I’m not sure if I should even approach it myself. Here is a stranger that I am meeting for the first time in front of whom I have performed my inconsistent waterworks, and consequently dragging him into my own world. Am I right to be doing this? Regardless of the fact that there must be a countless number of people like me who has done this to him and another set of people into the lives of whom he had ever so willingly stepped into.? My mind isn’t strong enough to make decisions. Its strength has long passed on. So I decide to wait for whatever his reaction might be. I thought he’d go for it, questioning me like a secondary school teacher who has caught a child crying in class, or like those psychiatrists who make you feel all the more miserable the moment you step into their rooms. But no. His approach is different. He starts off his conversation by asking; “So? Tea or coffee?”

“Huh?” I go, surprised, and he laughs, a beautiful one, probably at my strange expression. Then he gestures at the fridge. “What would you like? Tea? Coffee? Anything else?”

“No…” I mumble, and within a millisecond, I change my mind. “Maybe coffee. Black. And warm”

He nods, stands up and reaches for his pocket. But reacting faster, I begin to flail my purse in the air. “No, I’ll pay!”

He raised his brows at my direction. “What’s wrong with a man buying coffee for a lovely lady?”

I am certain my whole face goes crimson at the comment, but the clarity of it actually baffled me. “Those customs have gone with the past” I say, almost to myself, but he catches it soon.

“And some of us choose to live in that past” He says and pulls out his card.

“So” He begins as he carries the warm cans of coffee towards my direction. I move, giving him more space and bring my feet up to my chest, resting my chin on my knees. He sits down beside me, folds one foot over the other and covers his jean-clad knees with his coat. “Tell me” He then continues. “How is your soulmate like?”

It isn’t a difficult question, although I’m finding it difficult to respond to. I attempt to picture him in my mind, nonetheless, yet I end up failing miserably. “He’s…just like everyone else…? I don’t know”

He laughs the slightest. “Sounds like a very interesting person”

I pout. He has a point though. If he’s your soulmate, and if you have been in love with him for years, you have got to be endlessly enthralling about how perfect he was. But no, I have nothing. It’s like all the memories I had recollected with him have faded away with him disappearing from my life. In a matter of few minutes.

“Well” I begin in the end, convincing myself that I had indeed loved my soulmate. “He was nice…he tells jokes. He makes me laugh a lot. And we really had a good time together…” I sigh in the end, and look away at the empty white wall where a window to the outside world should be. “It’s strange, you know…to think that your soul mate is no longer there…”

1004 takes time to analyze this in complete quietness. He takes a sip of coffee; I take one from mine. Then he meddles with his can, shifting it from one hand to another and kept his eyes focused on this process. It takes a moment before he raises his eyes. “It’s kind of sad that the entire soulmate deal is a complete deception, and nobody tries to really change it” He says in the end.

I perk up upon the entirely new piece of information. “What do you mean a deception?”

He tut-tuts and shakes his head in annoyance. “No…no, deception isn’t the right word”

I watch him quietly, although supplying him the words which I think fits would be convenient.

“I mean, it is kind of a deception, but in reality, it is the rest of us who have gotten the wrong idea and they don’t even put an effort to change it” He explains in a rather hurried voice, and then he adds, softly, as if the words will hurt me. “Perhaps it is the idea that they want us to believe”

I shake my head, completely losing every sense of his words. I had no idea what he is referring to. What deception? What wrong idea? Who on earth are they?

“What are you talking about?” I decide to ask in the end. This gathers his attention, his complete attention that he sets down his can of coffee on the table before us and turns himself towards me.

“Here’s the deal” He says, and clasps his hand. “The deception is that they let us believe that they’re in control of our emotions, that the machine chooses whom our soulmates should be. They made us believe that there is some sort of a conspiracy behind this whole soulmate business that everyone has now begun to doubt it, question it and thinking that we should not let them make choices for us and maybe make the choices by ourselves”

I blink in confusion. “So you’re saying that the machine does not decide that we’re soulmates?”

1004 nods. “And also, it doesn’t react that way because you are soulmates. It doesn’t work that way”

“Then how does it?” I question, still haven’t been cleared of my doubts. He turns completely to me then, and places a hand on my shoulder. “Say, weren’t you hesitant and lost at that time when I asked you how your soulmate is like?”

I bit my lip in question, realizing that he also had harbored the same doubt that I myself had.

“It’s because, this whole time, you hung onto him because the light indicated that you two were soulmates. You thought that the mere shine of your chest proved to you that you belonged together” he then retrieved his hand. “Did you two ever exchange the three words?”

Almost mechanically, I shook my head. Things were slowly beginning to explain themselves to me. We never exchanged our love for each other, not because we were scared of losing our shine of reassurance but because we were feeling insecure, because we were uncertain of our own likeness to each other. So when this realization hits me, I look up to meet his eyes in new found fear, my eyes possibly begging him to give me answers. He smiled at me softly then. A little sympathetic, but a lot understanding, and says in a low but a stern and clear voice. “You two were never in love”

For a moment, I sit in comfortable silence, letting this new information sink into my mind. The more I think of the, the more sense it seems to make. True, we were never in love. We never had that spark. We never had that shine glistening in our eyes when we look at each other like these truest pairs of soulmates had, looking at one another as if they were their whole world. We were physically connected. We were physically passionate. It isn’t wrong to say that we sometimes couldn’t keep our hands away from one another. But that isn’t what love is all about. It’s that mutual connection, that enigmatic power every two soulmates shared which not only connected them but bonded them to one another, on their own choice and own accord, as if they were, truly, unconditionally, one.

But he and I had never felt that way. We never were.

“Because you were deceived by it” 1004 adds from my right, almost as a brutal reminder.  “Because the glow told that you were soulmates, and so you thought you were”

“But then…?” I whisper, still taken by that initial shock from the revelation. “What exactly happens? Why would things be that way?”

He nods. “I have done my research”, then he pulls one of his feet up to the seat and sits in a comfortable position, moving rather closer to me. This formation suddenly makes me feel really giddy and rather uncomfortable. Here I am, sitting too close than necessary with an exceptionally gorgeous man, discussing my failed love life. I knew that it isn’t a moment to feel all the superfluous things. But I love it how the closeness brought us to share our bodily heat in this quiet and cold confines. The four walls suddenly seem too big for us, but it doesn’t make me feel insecure. I like it how I can hear his beautiful voice, right in my ear like a warm summer breeze, washing away all the doubts in my mind. I like it when our feet brushed slightly, knowing that we had only a few layers separating us. It’s wrong in every manner and sense. But to me, it feels right, and I simply allow myself to feel that way.

“Are you okay?” his voice breaks into my stupor, and I almost choke on my warm coffee, which I was drinking at that moment to distract myself. I purse my lips and nod hastily. “Yes” I say and turn to me. “So what does your research explain?”

He nods and takes a sip of his own coffee. “Did you know that almost twenty-five percent of the general population of this area we live in, have not been planted a machine?”

I furrow my brows in question. “Really? I thought we consider it the ‘Coming of age’”

“It is” he nods and carries on. “But the thing is, the authorities want the human kind to last longer. We’re in a great threat, our extinction is getting nearer and slowly we’re losing our power. This is exactly like Darwin’s theory from all those years ago. The fittest must survive”

“The fittest?”

“Hm” He takes another sip of his coffee. “The fittest. So we want the fittest of the population to carry out their inheritance, pass on their perfect genes to the next generation so that the coming humans won’t have any incapability. We can’t afford to have any more genetic mutations, genetically transferred diseases, or even mental disorders like depression which may be passed on from generation to generation. Including fatal allergies and any kind of potential threat which could harm the future of our kind”

“Okay” I nod, and urge him to carry on.

“So” he shifts a bit, bringing us even closer. “You might not remember this, or maybe you do, but you get so many tests done on you from the day you were born. Right?”

I tilt my head in an attempt to recall anything of the such from my childhood. “Well, I remember the tests I had to take after my menstruation began” I sincerely reply. And he nods in response. (I have read about how, in the past, many, many years ago, men and women got affected by speaking of personal things like menstruation in front of each other or in a crowd, but I can’t ever come around to understand why they were this way. These were all simply go-on-the-mill things in this day and age)

“That’s to test your ability of reproduction and to see if there are any slight problems that they could fix” He explains unaffectedly. “There are so many other tests done on you. You get all the vaccinations at the right time, and so they check if your parents have followed this procedure through. In the beginning, they check if you have any disabilities, hidden diseases or genetically mutations like thalassemia, or if you’re a career of some sort of a genetically passed disease. Then when you grow older, they keep checking if you have caught any sicknesses or if you have badly fractured your bones or damaged vital organs. The thing is, you need to be completely physically fit to be a bearer of the future generation. So if they confirm that you are, then they plant the machine in you”

I nod, taking in all of that rather complex bit of information. “So basically, the machine is there to signify that you’re fit enough to be a bearer?”

He looks at me, and then looks down with a chuckle. “Oh no…” He shakes his head, smiling. “The machine is there because you’re fit enough. But the real job of the machine is…well, you could say that the glow in your chest is more of a signal”

“Signal?” I tilt my head in confusion, and he nods, clarifying what I asked. “A signal” Then he brings his hands together and leans forward, bringing us dangerously close, so much so that my heart begins to hammer so relentlessly at the proximity, at how close his voice was, at how I could see the generous textures of his pale skin and the shape of his eyes. I take a cautious move to my back, in hopes that he wouldn’t notice my discomfort. And thankfully, he doesn’t.

“So this is how it works” He begins, and looks up at me as if to confirm that I am still listening. “When you meet someone of the opposite gender, who coincidentally is not taken by a soulmate, the machines will react to your basic instincts. And say, if by any chance you are attracted to this person, your body reacts accordingly, right? Your heart beat raises, your pupils dilate…you feel your whole body warming up and blood descending to your cheeks. You feel the butterflies fluttering inside you, endlessly. Your breathing hitches, you become nervous. You lose your voice…And slowly, you lose yourself”

He trails off at that moment, and despite our incredible proximity, he just says nothing. He only stares up at me as if he has suddenly forgotten what to say, as if he was searching for the answers in my eyes. Naturally, I find myself staring back. It makes me feel so giddy, so nervous, like I’m a teen aged girl who is seeing an attractive boy for the first time. I begin to notice the smallest things about him. His soft pink lips, his perfectly angled nose, the brownness of his eyes. They are specifically breathtaking. They remind me of the autumn because they hold its golden color. But the warmth that they seem to give away was of the summer, and they were gleaming, beautifully. They were the kind of eyes which seemed to hold the entire universe. And all of these smallest facts overwhelm me. I am just after a break up after being in a loveless relationship for two years because the light my chest gave out tricked me into it, and now, here I am, discussing my broken love life with a gorgeous man who makes my heart do somersaults.

And it suddenly occurs to me that I am starting to feel…strange. Different. Things that I refuse to acknowledge for many, many reasons.

So I pull away and avert my eyes to look down at my lukewarm coffee. He too, turns away, takes a sip of his coffee in order to get rid of the awkwardness we just lived in a moment ago. Then he continues.

“So the machine is there to sense all those emotions inside you, then to correlate with the machine of the other, share the information and its intelligence comes to a decision that it is indeed a positive match”

“If the other person feels the same way” I clarify.

“If the other person feels the same way” He repeats, nodding in agreement.

“And if it is a positive match…?”

“It releases the enzyme into your blood circulation” He says, and with a smile he adds, “Then you begin to glow”