A Ghost within the Pages

I escaped to the graveyard any chance I could get, finding more comfort amongst the dead. It was the only quiet place left. The only place without the holograms blocking the view of the few decaying trees. The only place the H.A.I. didn’t come.

The H.A.I.

Humanoid Artificial Intelligence. But they weren’t humanoid at all. They showed no compassion as they monitored our movements. They watched us, stalked us, guided us, controlled us. White, slick bodies with silver eyes and metal hearts became our mothers, our teachers, our leaders.

I suffocated amongst the steel buildings, curved alabaster archways, and drifting platforms that moved on a phantom wind. It was a world that was always spinning. The H.A.I. worked us ragged. Their steel bodies didn’t need rest. They didn’t decay and wither away like we did.

My legs were shaky as I slid down the shiny tombstone. The marble felt cold against my back, biting through the thin material of my shirt. My thighs dampened as the morning dew grass soaked through my pants. The graveyard was a trek to get to, hidden away in a nook of the city, undiscovered by the H.A.I. It was my only sanctuary.

Now when we died, the robots burned our bodies. The flickers of embers and ash that was once a soul melted away, never leaving a trace of existence.

“I thought I’d find you here,” a deep voice sounded from behind me.

Rhett. The only other person who knew about this hidden gem. The only other person that loathed the H.A.I. as much as I did.

I whipped my head towards him. “Why are you here?”

“Hi, Saffrine. Nice to see you too,” he said. His lips curved up into a half smile. The dimple on his left cheek deepened.

I rolled my eyes, “It’s nice to see you, Rhett, but I thought you had a shift at the factories. How did you get here so fast?”

Rhett lifted his arms, flashing a hoverboard, “I flew here.”

My mouth gaped open, “Rhett, if the H.A.I. caught you stealing, you could get sent to the Prison or worse.

His grin turned devilish, “That’s only if I get caught, Saf.”

I was always so amazed at how relaxed Rhett was. How he could risk the same fate as our families, acting like stealing was as casual as taking a morning stroll. It was how we met. At the orphanage factories, forced into manual labor for the crimes of our families. For crimes we didn’t commit. For crimes that were not truly crimes. We had to pay the price to have the luxury of our families' placement in the Prison. That was what they told us when we were ripped from our homes as children. My parents stole a blanket. Their only felony was wanting to keep their daughter warm amid the harsh, brutal winter. Rhett’s brother took bread. One slice, and now he was forced to rot away.

“Besides,” he mused as he slid down the tombstone to sit next to me. “I have something important to show you.”

“What?” I asked, perking up.

He patted the stone, “How is Lucy this morning?”

Lucy Ashington, our favorite tomb. Died in 2153, long before the H.A.I. tainted our world. Rhett and I liked to make up stories, her stories. We would spin her life in tales untainted by technology. A world where the trees still swayed in the wind and animals roamed the ground. A world with more color than just silver and grey. Lucy lived a simple life in our heads, a peaceful life, a life we both envied.

“Rhett, don’t change the subject. What was so important that you risk stealing a hoverboard to tell me?”

Rhett twisted, fishing something out of his back pocket. The object was small in his massive, calloused hands — hands that were too overworked for our youth.

“Is that…” I breathed, leaning into him. I was too memorized by the object to feel shy about the way my thigh pressed into his, the way he cocked his head to the side and pushed his chestnut curls out of his eyes to gaze down at me.

“A notebook,” he finished for me. I had never seen one before. The H.A.I. taught about them in our schooling, briefly mentioning that humans used to record words on dead, processed trees. The H.A.I. claimed it was one of the many faults of our kind. That we destroyed our planet, taking away vegetation for our own enjoyment. When they took over, it was one of the first things they banned. Paper became illegal.

“How did you get this?” I asked, my voice breathless and raged. Rhett chucked the notebook into my hands. The frail leather felt delicate in my palms as if it could melt away in seconds. My eyebrows furrowed at his lack of respect for the bindings. This had to be ancient, existing long before the H.A.I. Existing long before Lucy.

“I found it in the Grim.” Rhett whispered, leaning in so close that I could feel his breath hot against my neck. Even though we were miles from the city, miles from the factories, we took precautions. It was ingrained in us.

“The Grim as in the locked vault seven stories below ground level?”

“That would be the one,” he said.

My mind whirled with a thousand different questions. How did he find it? What was the Grim like? Were there more artifacts hidden beneath the ground?

“Why did you risk going there?” I seethed. I couldn’t lose him too. I couldn’t handle another person I loved going into the Prison.

“Happy Birthday,” was all he said.

How Rhett managed to prowl into the Grim was beyond me. He could pick any lock, sneak past any detection camera. He became a ghost just like the ones that roamed this graveyard, going undetected and unnoticed.

But the Grim was different. It claimed to be sealed during the initial war against the H.A.I. by our ancestors. They locked the vault with advances the H.A.I. couldn’t grasp. The vault was monitored constantly, but in all this time, the H.A.I. had never been able to get in. They had never been able to destroy what our ancestors fought to preserve, and here I was holding something from it.

An elastic band hung around the ebony cover. I peeled it back to flip the notebook open. Thousands of loose green rectangles fell from the open pages. Some of the strange paper was tucked into a back pocket, smooth with rounded corners. Strange men stared back at me from the center of the loose papers with markings and numbers filling the sides.

“Twenty dollars?” I read the texts on the filmy paper as I looked up at Rhett. His onyx eyes were alive, the blackness of them turning to flames, burning a hole through me.

“It’s money and a lot of it. I counted it twice. It adds up to be about twenty thousand wages. They called it cash.” He said as he leaned back against Lucy’s tomb, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “It’s from before the technological era when paper was still legal. People would use this to buy things. They could buy tons of notebooks. People used to write, and not just history, Saf. They would write stories of made up worlds with imaginable people.”

Just like him and I did with Lucy.

“You can write, Saf. It doesn't have to stay in your head. Here,” he said as he tapped the cover. His eyes still burning into me. “Here, your thoughts can turn into letters, into words, into stories. You can write such beautiful stories. Write everything down so someone may stumble upon your thoughts long after you and I are gone. Write everything down so that you can still exist after they burn our bodies. Leave a part of you in this world, Saffrine.”

I wouldn’t get a tombstone like Lucy. I wouldn’t get a marker declaring that I was here. That I lived and I breathed and I felt. My body, my existence, would melt away into the wind. But my mind could live on forever. My words could last.

I flipped the book open, skimming the empty pages. I expected them to be tinged like the rest of our rotting world — brown and death amongst the sea of metal. But they were ivory and smooth and inviting me to fill them. My heart raced, pounding so fast I thought it would leap out of my chest. I could write anything down. My words would go unnoticed by the H.A.I.

I could become a ghost, if only within the pages of this small black book.