//------------------------------// // 50 - Emilia: Emilia's Dream // Story: Synch // by sunnypack //------------------------------// When I think back to the time I spent with Emilia I’m always assaulted by a storm of emotions. Fear. Love. Distrust. Happiness. Anger. Contentment. Pain. I never really thought about how lucky I was to have Emilia until she passed away. There were times, when I look into the void and the people around me, I would see drifters and ponder. Society who had invented a purpose for them and they allowed themselves to be carried by the flow. They cared not where they ended up, only that they were moderately happy. It made me frustrated that they didn’t see the bigger picture. It made me frustrated that I also couldn’t make myself care. I was a rock in a stream of humanity, the people I met were brief crashes against my hard façade, and they left as little impression on me. Emilia had broken through all that. She slowly introduced me to the finer things in life. There was art, there was music, and there was life. I craved it all. She was just as excited as I was when I had received my Synch gear. She said, “Now the world is at your fingertips.” I laughed, as I replied, “No, the world is merely a thought away.” No sooner than a week after Synch was released a malicious knot had appeared on certain Synch users who visited an illegal knot downloading extranet page. People who inexplicably ran the knot was assaulted by light seizures and loud, repetitive noises until they could get their Synch serviced by a local Grooble-run store. The program, named ‘Phreak’, was a play on an old hacking term used to infiltrate phone lines in the old days, when we still had wired phone networks. The developer was unable to be tracked but security had tightened on Synchs around the world. When Emilia had heard of this, her sense of justice kicked in. She demanded to research techniques in order to improve Synch. Though her goal was to become an arm on the law of justice in society, she worked just as sincerely on the Synch, her talent showing no bounds. We worked night and day on the Black Box project. It became somewhat of an obsession between the two of us. Emilia had been the one to originally find exploits in various models of smartphones and Synch firmware and I had come up with the idea of ‘recruiting’ the phones and Synch devices into the network. It wasn’t long before our plan had been finished. I was starting to have regrets on even making something like this but Emilia had given me a shoulder up on the idea. “Relax”, she had said, giving me a shoulder nudge. “It’ll be fine, a weapon protects when it is wielded by the righteous, and becomes dangerous when it is wielded by the wicked.” I blew out a breath at that, forcing myself not to think too deeply on the issue. Emilia had brightened when she considered a thought. “Maybe you should apply for the Grooble young interns take in?” she had proposed, to which I had vehemently denied. She had nodded in agreement. “You need a lesson in making friends”, she teased, punching me on the arm. I had rubbed that shoulder in annoyance. “Whatever.” So began my long journey of ‘making friends’ with Emilia as my guide. “It wasn’t hard”, she had chided. “You just have to stop thinking too much, you brainiac.” I couldn’t help it if I was smart. Cut me some slack. I had gone through with it optimistically though, which was rare for me in general. Very soon after, I had reached out to those who had been near me. I met a bright girl named Bonny, who had been afraid of the tales I had sown with my misdeeds. Luckily, Emilia was there to back up my reputation and she had one of her own, being a righteous paragon in the small high school. Alex had been next and he was a quiet kid, a bit like Paul when I had first met him in the interview, but he was permanently shy. I would like to say we were good friends, but I hardly got to know these two in the few-shared months we’d been in high school together. When Emilia had died, we drifted apart and I became alone as I had been from the beginning. I guess Synch had brought me back to the game of making friends. When Emilia had lain in the ambulance, gasping her last breaths, Dwayne had told me she said this: "Remember me, for my dream. Remember me for our dream." At the bedside where she had rested at the funeral, Dwayne had asked me what that had meant. I was broken up but at the time I didn't know what she had meant. Was she talking about Black Box? Did she want me to carry out her mission of justice in this inequitable world? I didn't know, and I probably never would. It was one of many regrets I had in my life. Today, I reflected that Synch really had a knack for bringing things full circle, the same way its ring connected it’s components on a grand circlet, like the ancient Greek symbol of Ouroboros, forever devouring its tail. My life had been about beginnings and ends but musing of the future simply brought questions about the end. What will I choose to be at the end? Will I even have a choice? Perhaps it will be along time in coming. I could only hope.