“Ten million years have gone by and-“ On top of a small hill, I was reading a book. A book containing a memory of mine I had just dreamt.

“Ten million? It was a few hundred years.” Lucy mentioned, one eye of her barely open while she she gripped an ailing flower by her side.

“It felt like ten million … why is this so boring?” Seriously, with nothing to do except to talk to Lucy who I knew more and more already since we shared more and more of our memories, I was bound to get bored.

“It was never meant to be fun …” She mumbled, laid on her belly and stared at the withering flowers in between us. The line between death and life was blurrier than ever before as flowers, albeit barely alive, had started to grow on my side of our home as well.

“Whoever is the reason for my imprisonment should be hanged. Seriously, could that person not have thought about giving us some games?” Monopoly would be nice. Teaching her the horrors of capitalism would be great because she was far too naïve for my preferences.

“We are the reason for this.” She flailed her arms around wildly, pointing at everything and nothing in the process.

“I know. And I hate us for that.” I mumbled while closing my eyes once more. A strange tiredness engulfed me again, even though I gave my best to shake it off.

“Just sleep.” Lucy turned around onto her back, probably stared at the stars above us for a few seconds before I had enough.

“I slept the last two hundred years. I have enough.” As soon as I finished speaking that, the stars brightened considerably, waking us both up completely. It was basically an alarm we set ourselves to measure how much our souls and the body we had were degrading. Let´s just say … it was way too fast for comfort. Even while we were in this comatose state everything was going downhill and didn’t even dare to think what would happen when we inevitably woke up again. “That’s not a great sign. We can’t stay awake for too long anymore.”

“We aren’t ready yet … the amount of crystal generating fluid is far too little.” If there was any good news in these hundreds of years of sleeping, then that we found a way to save the world from utter doom which we would certainly be responsible for. And we kind of wanted to avoid that as there were some people whose soul I wanted to protect. But on the other hand, Lucy wanted to save everyone which was near impossible.

“Poor fellas who won’t be saved … I’d say let them die. Unless you want us to die?” My assumption was that we would not able to save everyone. At least that’s what basic math and my instincts told me.

“Lucinda, I believe we can do this.” Lucy was having none of that. She was still far too idealistic to give up on her ultimate goal, even though even striving for it would be impossible.

“Some of them will die ... for us.” I lifted my hands up and looked at them concerned. Cracks were all over my skin my pale skin turned red in some places and deathly black in others. It wasn’t a good sight, especially not when I balled them to fists and couldn’t muster any strength at all. “We are at our limit. Believe it or not. Either we do something and save a few or … we will all die.”

“Lucinda, we can-“ No, we wouldn’t be able to save everyone. It was hardly possible to save the world itself, especially with our health. We already had to get rid of a few things on Solaris nobody would miss like the deep underground or the high skies above … but even that wasn’t enough.

“I can’t feel my right leg anymore.” I interjected while letting my hands fall back to the ground. On the way there, I caressed my legs, but could only feel the touch on my left one. My right one … it was still there and I could move it somewhat, but I couldn’t feel anything with it.

“… since when?” Lucy asked worried which made me laugh a little. She was feeling exactly the same after all.

“Since I woke up a few days ago.” I explained, turned my head towards her and witnessed how she looked to the ground saddened.

“… so do I.” Laughing loudly, I sat up with the best of my abilities and inspected my injured body. It was certainly not a great sight so see the damaged skin of my hands basically everywhere, but even that couldn’t stop me from laughing even more.

“You are too idealistic to admit that our plan needs to be shortened while I am too prideful to admit any injuries at all. Lucy … our souls are merging at a faster rate than what we had hoped for. We need to hasten.” I placed my hand on her shoulder and stared into these green eyes which wavered considerably.

“Can we … can we calculate again how much time we have left?” She asked while closing her eyes.

“It takes days …” I exhaled loudly. Sure, I wanted to do something, but math wasn’t among these things.

“It’s not like we have anything else to do, do we?” Closing my eyes for a second, I nodded quietly and attempted to stand up. My right foot gave way several times and every bone in my body hurt but in the end, I did manage to sit down on the chair I created myself and leaned forwards, pen already in my hand.

“I guess we can infer by substitution … hopefully.” And with that, the tedious work of calculating how much time we had left began anew. Every bit of information we had flowed into our calculations, from everything we knew about Solaris before cut ourselves off its information years ago to save energy, to the current decay of our body. With our tired minds, it took us days to complete, and the solution was not exactly what we had hoped for.

In theory, our souls should merge much slower, at least that’s what we had assumed in the beginning.

“The mana usage was higher than expected …” And mana was one of the variables slowing the merging of our souls down. And as long as humans kept using their diminishing amounts of mana, they would inevitably hurt us implicitly. We also couldn’t drop mana levels to a low right away as that would be … even less desirable for everyone. As such, we had to generate mana all over the world which was where most of our energy went to.

“Which is why our souls merge faster.” I exhaled tired and slammed my hand onto the fist, only to regret it right away. ”Who the fuck is using that amount of mana?” I complained annoyed by these intelligent species which didn’t even know in what danger they were in. Ignorance is a bliss …

“The population might have increased.” Lucy thought loudly.

“I told Hannah she should keep the population down. Damn humans … fucking like rabbits.” Well, not going to lie, I was worse than them … probably.

“Don’t panic Lucinda.” Lucy was clearly panicking, probably already imagining the millions and millions of deaths we would cause.

“I’m not panicking.” I told her dryly. I really wasn’t. So far I hadn’t lost my cool as I didn’t care if a few more millions died or not.

“We can do this.” Was she even talking to me? Or to herself? I couldn’t tell.

“No we can’t.” I mumbled.

“We are going to save everyone.” Yep. I wasn’t the only one who was struggling with the situation, that was for sure.

“No we won’t.”

“Okay we won’t. Not with a hundred years of sleeping or less than a year of being awake … let us start preparing everything for when we do wake up, okay?” At last, she finally admitted that there was no way around waking up earlier than planned.

“And when will that be?” I grumbled unhappily. Sleep was nice and all, especially with a beauty like her at my side, but still. Too much of it is horrible.

“A year. Give it a year.” A year … could I live with a year? Maybe. Did I have any other choice? Probably not. I needed her cooperation after all.

“Okay…” So a year it was. Sighing quietly, I got back onto the ground and crawled over to her while she did the same. Once more, we laid down on the top of the hill, hugged each other and closed our eyes. I would have loved to hug Luna in my sleep, but knowing that she was with us, as a bright star above us was enough for the time being.