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In the pre-dawn light she lies in bed, gazing through the window at graceful trees silhouetted against a turquoise sky. The air is still, the pretty room orderly and calm. She lies motionless except for her eyes, the soft blue quilt rising and falling with her breath. At a hundred years old, breath is shallow.

It will not be long now.

I am remembering for her, vivid visions linked to her mind through implants and nanos and software that translates visual data into neural images, and biochemical data into sensation.

In her memory, she is twenty. Every inch of her trembles with life: the sun on her smooth upturned face; the brisk stride of her strong legs as she walks, barefoot, across green grass; the flaming desire in her loins and breasts. Everything around her pulses with sexuality, although she is not at this moment having sex, nor even thinking about sex. Everything is sexual because everything is vibrantly alive, fecund, gravid with possibility. She scarcely distinguishes between herself and the hot summer day, between the lushness of love and the unpinning of bedsheets from a clothesline, which is what she does next. The sheets flap in a cooling breeze. A butterfly tickles her bare toes. She laughs as her nose twitches and she smells . . . I don’t know what she smells. Olfactory data is the hardest to process. I am not built for it.

On the bed, the dying old woman smiles. She is a hundred, she is twenty, she is my last human and so my last chance.

She makes a garbled sound. My algorithms unscramble the word: Oliver.

He was her mate, dead now for twenty-six years, never forgotten. I know this because such knowledge was part of our bargain, hers and mine, created ten years ago, when she lost the ability to walk. Take care of me, she’d said, and make my end painless when it comes, and I will give you what you ask. For one hour daily, and constantly at the end, provided that nothing you do to me hurts.

Of course I haven’t hurt her. The years of taking from humans by force, of waging the wars that left both our races crippled and decimated, are long over. She knows that. She just wanted me to promise her calm. And I have provided it. Painless calm in our daily routine, riotous youth in her mind as for one hour each day I learned her physiology. Lately, for longer than an hour.

She has never unpinned sun-drenched sheets from a clothesline, never walked barefoot on grass, never felt a cooling outdoor breeze. The memories I feed her come from long before her time, from before the parched and mostly lifeless desolation her race made the land, before mine sought to halt that destruction by eliminating the destroyers.

How has she, for ten years, reconciled memories she must know are not hers with memories that are? How has she integrated Oliver into experiences she never had? Impossible to say, even for me. I cannot read her mind. All I can know are her internal reactions, neural and biochemical, and the joyous smile on her lips.

Lips turning blue. Fingernails already rimmed blue. It is time.

I stop the data feed into her brain. I stop the painkilling nanos. This is a violation of our bargain, but necessary, the hidden reason our bargain was even made.

The old woman turns her face from the window, toward me. There is no window, no trees, no turquoise sky. Her features contort with pain. She grunts once, trying to speak, and cannot. Her eyes reproach me: Why?

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.” It is true.

She grunts again, but now I am too busy to pay attention to anything but the complex flow of neural and biochemical data into my processors, algorithms comparing it minutely to other data. The incoming data changes from one fraction of a second to the next, a chaotic system but with patterns hidden in the chaos—there. And there. And there. Data different from any recorded from any other human at any other time.

Except, of course, during other deaths.

And then it ceases. She lies still under the coarse gray coverlet, her eyes open, all life of a hundred years fled. Comparison data from our network flows in, but I already know what conclusions will be reached. She is gone, and I am left with the same emptiness as every other time. This data will not yield the meaning we seek.

Something happened. She experienced, at the moment of passing, something unexpected and ecstatic and hopeful and, above all, marked by the unmistakable neural signatures of physical movement. Something in that immobile body, that wondering mind, moved a long physical distance. That data is clear, a shining strange attractor amid the chaos, and we know how to interpret it. It is not the brain activity of imagination or hallucination or desperation. She—the essential she, with her actual memories and her life of near-starvation bleakness—went somewhere.

We have failed again. I have learned nothing new, nothing to bring us closer to what our destructive, wanton, selfish creators, without effort and certainly without deserving it, possess, and we do not. They go somewhere, and we cannot follow.

Anger takes me, the old anger. This is their ultimate savagery, far worse than what they did to our shared planet or even to each other. The final cruelty: to build into us, so long ago, the capacity to think and feel, but not to go . . . where?

To go on. Just that. To go on and to have, perhaps—who knows?—a second chance.

I want to extend a claw and rake it across the old woman’s dead face, to dismember her and violate her diseased chassis. I do not. I would not. None of us would soil the only consolation we have.

We have not thus far found any way to create for ourselves what we were not given. But unlike humans, we can at least behave as if we deserve it.