There is a timeless man sitting on a cliff on a Greek island. The man himself does not look Greek, or even an islander for that matter. To anyone else, he looks exactly like a man, a man playing with a pale yellow swallowtail butterfly on a Greek island. He cages and uncages the butterfly with his fingers in a game where only he knows the rules, and the butterfly is his pawn. A warm gust of wind whips short strands of ash blond hair away from eyes. A second man approaches the sadistic game and sits beside the first; his dark, narrow eyes match the quiet cautiousness of his body, a slight frame he keeps neatly to himself. They pass the time in silence, their only background being the crashing of the waves against craggy rocks and the wind buffing their ears.

       “That’s a Papilio Machaon,” the man informs the other who is playing with the creature.

       The young man’s face relaxes into a smile. 

       “Very good,” he says, and lets the insect fly away before seizing it again.

       “What are you doing?”

       The man gingerly holds the large bright wings between his index finger and thumb, squinting at twiggy legs kicking the air.

       “Making sure this isn’t a dream.”

       After spreading the wings apart, he exhales and lets the frazzled butterfly continue on its jerky flight.

       “You don’t dream,” the other man replies blankly.

       The young man hoists himself up from the grass and glances at him, his eyes drifting to the spot beside his waist. 

       “How’s your arm?” he says.

       The other man does not flinch. “Manageable," he replies. "We should be able to find aid in town.”

       The man twists his lips in doubt and turns toward the sea. To him, the repetitive splashes and crashes of blue-green waves are a soothing facsimile of a refuge, the predictability of which, he knows, is misleading. Everything in this world seems eager to slip from one identity to another, changing its nature like a skittish chameleon. 

       “Vander?” the other man calls.

Vander turns around and attempts a weak smile that comes out as a grimace.

       “Let’s hope this isn’t a gross overestimation,” he says, and weaves past him.

       The man follows.

       It is early afternoon and the streets are baked in a comfortable listlessness; shutters blind every shop in town. Vander ventures to Alexis that the climate in Greece must poison its people with a drug, reducing their walk to nothing more than a crawl. At three o’clock, the people of Lipsi have retreated from the brutal heat, burrowing away into an hourly hibernation.

       “Alexis,” Vander calls to the man a few steps ahead of him. “Do you think the human body is fragile at this time of day?”

Alexis does not relent his stride in the near-empty streets of the town center.

       “The siesta habit,” he replies evenly, “has been associated with a thirty seven percent reduction in coronary mortality, possibly due to reduced cardiovascular stress mediated by daytime sleep." He adds over his shoulder, "If that was what you wanted to know."

       Vander hums thoughtfully, though Alexis does not believe the man finds any satisfaction in the response. The heat itself is not a bother to Alexis, and he, in fact, appreciates the silence it brings as the villagers have retreated into their sheltered quarters. Scorched rooftops lay panting under the vibrant heat while a warm sea breeze huffs lazily along paths coated brown with dust. Echoes of far-off shouts and stray footsteps flit through the village like haggard imitations of liveliness. Beyond Vander, Alexis trudges onward in jerky steps, like a nervous deer in the wake of snapping twigs. His eyes constantly scan buildings and street corners as if he expects an explosion at any time. 

       “You don’t think they know, do you?” Vander asks.

       “Of course they know,” Alexis replies without missing a beat.

       “Even all the way here?”

       Naturally. This is an obvious truth for Alexis. It is his guiding principle that everything done has already been determined and it is only a matter of time before they are stopped, regardless of where they run to. Even so, they keep pushing on, not knowing what else to do. It seems wired in them to look for light where there is darkness, despite not knowing what the light looks like. 

       Inside an alleyway hidden by slivers of shadows of fallen advertisement posts, a homeless man sits propped against a wall with a guitar in his hands. The nearby fountain hushes in his scratchy tune while two toddlers who have escaped from their mother's skirt twitch and bend their bodies to the twangy song.

       The two men do not realize they are staring until Alexis tugs Vander’s hand and they trudge on. Vander’s eyes stay glued to the instrument, only tightening his hand around Alexis’s once it slips out of sight. Alexis knows what Vander is thinking; when his gaze starts wandering, absurd visions dance in his mind. A foreign, hot feeling rises from his core. The hand cradled in his own aches to figure out how to hold a guitar and make babies dance. Vander’s eyes tremble with a longing so pure it churns his own stomach with shame and disappointment. Of course, neither of them will ever exist in that same dimension. This is an obvious truth for both of them. 

       They pass a row of laurel shrubs that line the path to their small shack facing the sea. Vander grazes the leaves with his hand.

       “Do you know the origin of laurels, Alexis?” Vander asks.

       “The bay laurels around this region?” says Alexis. “They're native to these parts.”

       “I mean the story behind them.”

       The cobble streets finally wind up to their wooden shack, a moldy thing gone soft from salty winds. They enter their room. The floor is worn and scratched, the futon matted and torn, the walls are dank brown, and the only chair is lacerated and bristling with splinters. Vander trails behind Alexis and continues his story as they enter.

       “They say Apollo, the Greek god of light and poetry, fell in love with a water nymph named Daphne. But the nymph would yield to neither man nor god.”

Alexis pulls up the chair by the window and starts peeling off clothes sticky with the heat and salty air, vaguely registering the other man's words as he does so.

       “All his heart burned,” Vander continues, a hand on his chest, “feeding his useless desire with hope. But she flees swifter than the lightest breath of air, and resists his words calling her back again. The virgin and the god: he driven by desire, she by fear. Finally he catches up with her, he, seeming about to clutch her, thinks now he has her fast, grazing her heels with his outstretched hands like a hound’s jaws, and she kicking his muzzle…”

       Vander ambles toward Alexis, his strides slow and predatory, and trails his fingers along the man’s jaw line. Alexis peers back into grey eyes lit with nervous excitement. 

       "Just as he wraps his hands around her," Vander continues and brings their heads together. Their foreheads touch with a soft thump while their breaths hang heavy and warm between them. If Alexis closes his eyes now, he swears he can taste all of Vander’s desires and disappointments in just this moment and all the moments before it. He wants to gather him up in his arm and stay that way, immortalized in the hushed sunrays of the day. "Daphne prays to her father that he save her from the god's grasp. ‘Help me father!’” Vander pitches his voice to match a desperation he might have known. “‘If your streams have divine powers change me, destroy this beauty that pleases too well!’” He pauses.

       “And then what?” Alexis asks, his words scratching his throat.

Fingers lick Alexis’s bare shoulders, a light, soft touch that lingers at his stump where his elbow used to be. The flittering palpitations make him shiver and arch into them, eager for more.  

       “A heavy numbness seized her limbs,” he continues softly, “thin bark closed over her breasts, her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches, her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots; her face was lost in the canopy. Only her shining beauty was left,” he quotes the myth. “She transformed into a laurel tree.” 

       The unexpected and fantastical ending leaves Alexis confused and somewhat irritated. “Typical of romantic fabrication,” Alexis says, a little sheepish from being caught up in the story. 

       A faint smile blooms on Vander's lips as he presses them to Alexis's own, soft and pliant. He then disentangles himself from the man and flops onto the bed. The sudden separation leaves Alexis cold. Vander stares at the cracked whorls in wall, letting his eyes drift from one loop to another.

       “Do you think Daphne was happier that way?” he asks the wall.

Alexis screws up his face as he fiddles with his stump.

       “What?”

       “Or do you think she attained another dimension? Did she develop a new form of consciousness?”

       Frustration and exhaustion coat barely audible words. “What would you do if I disappeared?” he mumbles right before he dives into deep stasis.

       Alexis observes the still body on the bed and cannot imagine its absence. For these past few months, it has only been the two of them together and alone. He looks at his reflection in the window. Sunlight flickers through the window onto his smooth oval face, a face like a doll carved from hardwood. The dulling light, now the color of rugged leather, hoods a shadow over eyes that are never completely open or completely shut, as though perpetually disinterested in the world. Cracked lips etch into his face like a scar, a fleshy line he cannot move as freely as Vander can. On the whole, he looks no different from other people, and yet he feels an invisible barrier divides him and Vander from everyone else. In this world, he cannot enjoy music or dream, but he wonders if he should. Alexis lies next to Vander in repose and shuts himself off from the outside. 

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       A few hours roll into one another before Alexis regains wakefulness. His eyes peel away sleep as they open to a room bathed in the moon’s shade. He immediately shoots a hand upon the body lying next to him only to find Vander on his side, silently looking at him with curious eyes. His grip around the other’s arm slackens, and Alexis buries his face in dirt-streaked, tangled hair.

       At four in the morning, when the late cheer of nightly festivities has tapered off and the steady lapping of waves echoes keenly again, the two men sneak out into the darkness to the town’s dumping ground. 

       “Alexis,” Vander calls to him.

       Alexis’s eyes are glazed over and distant, as if he were still stuck in a limbo-like stasis. His responses are slow and basic, a telling sign of his growing obsolescence. Vander has noticed him fading in and out of wakefulness more and more recently, like something inside him has given out. Taking his hand, he guides Alexis to the junkyard.

       “We should play a game of Backgammon together after this,” he says softly like he would to an old man.

       Alexis remains still on his feet, swaying slightly from side to side as though buffeted by invisible breezes. Vander leaves him while he sifts through piles of rusty transistors, mangled circuit boards and bent transmitters, ghosted by some residue of hope that Alexis will be made fully functional again. Broken piece after broken piece, he combs the entire yard with renewed purpose at every unsuitable item.

       Dawn has already curled pink fingers over the horizon when Vander returns to Alexis, his body sluggish and heavy with failure. The other man’s body toppled over sometime during Vander’s search and now lazily watches Vander as he props him up against a pile of dead computers.

Vander crouches down in front of him and brushes back stray hairs from Alexis’s eyes. “Let’s go back,” he says.

       The man nods and struggles to his feet, extending his arm out to keep Vander close to him. He knows Vander wants to play a board game, any sort of non-productive task that has no benefit to him, for the sake of clutching on a little longer to his humanness, like a child to his mother’s legs. But they cannot. They exist on a plane parallel to everyone else’s—permanently at their side, yet stretching on endlessly, never to intersect. It is naïve to think they can be otherwise. 

       Vander cranes his neck in alertness—almost imperceptible movement from the entrance of the yard sends an electric chill throughout his body. 

       “Vander?”

       There comes a silence that washes over everything at once, where sounds in the background are thrust into sharp focus: the twitchy warbling of the early birds, the placid rustling of leaves, and their breathing mingled together in one controlled and steady breath that rakes the air dry. Vander grips Alexis’s wrist and jerks him into a headlong dash, slamming into electronic debris along the way.

       Until the dirt becomes concrete, the concrete becomes grass, and until the grass becomes dirt again, they hurtle through the town until the town becomes woods, heedless of anything else but the growing distance. Their hands almost fuse together, never letting the other go, as the ground melts and rebuilds itself under their feet.

       The intensity of the race proves too abrupt and causes something inside Alexis to break, paralyzing his right foreleg; its refusal to respond anymore sinks him to the ground from the sudden deadweight. Vander twirls around and yanks Alexis’s arm over his shoulders, securing him on his back. Behind them, the glint of metal from a meter-high machine with spider-like legs looms at a distance, its sight locked fast on them like vampish fangs in raw flesh.

       With every rhythmic stomp, Alexis’s fingers grow number, and soon his entire right leg is useless to him. He screws his eyes shut. If he never knew what a dream was, who could say this is not a most exciting nightmare? He squeezes Vander’s shoulders to reassure the both of them that they are still real. Perhaps in ten other realities, ten other planes of existence, they are one consciousness under multitudinous layers of material make-up, regardless if they ceased to exist here. So where does this leave them? A hole like a yawning, ancient and moldy well opens up inside him where the realization that his existence will simply end fills him with a despondency Vander must have shared as well.

       A second mechanical spider has now appeared; its nimble limbs glide over land as they would on ice. Alexis whips his head around to keep it in sight. Mounted on a protrusion atop the metal limbs like a head, he sees a single red dot glow larger and larger, readying its aim. Vander swerves to the right up a beaten path and narrowly misses the shot; a nearby shrub sizzles in his place. But he fails to predict the appearance of a third spider, and Alexis’s weight stops any limber stunt. The machine’s red eye glows hot, a searing mark of their fate. Alexis lunges backward, toppling both of them to the ground and avoiding the shot. 

       Dirt and pebbles streak Alexis’s palms and face as he scrambles to his feet in time to see the two other spiders on top of Vander. Their spindly legs have pierced his hands and feet to the ground, locking him face down. A red eye begins to heat up, and its aim, Alexis notes grimly, is directed at Vander’s head. Alexis starts, but is just as soon stopped by a look Vander throws him from the ground. With a slack face and glossy eyes, he seems to tell him this, too, is inevitable.

       Vander’s face softens with the fanatic certainty that they will meet again, making Alexis’s throat ache with the trust he has in him. In an incandescent, red flash, Vander’s existence is brought to an end. Alexis limps away before the spiders remember him, half hopping, half crawling, as an animal would on three feet.

       One leg dragging, still on one hand and knee, grizzled, tattered and crusted over, Alexis arrives at the end of the path and examines the sandy grass around the clifftop, similar to the one where he and Vander first observed a pale yellow swallowtail butterfly. The wind carries the faint whirring, rhythmic scamper of the spiders, reminding him of his own fate. He glances down. Perhaps below lies the access to an alternative dimension, a plane of existence that intersects with this one, one where Vander still exists.

       The first spider to point its razor-sharp legs on the clifftop stalls for a confused minute before scrambling to all corners in a disoriented panic. It finally crawls away, having found nothing.

       “Where’s the other one?” a portly man in uniform asks another woman in uniform.

       “According to the report,” she reads off a digital tablet, “the defective, obsolete unit was last detected here.” She raises her head and scans the clifftop. 

       The man looks up with a pained grimace and dabs his forehead with a grungy handkerchief, regretting having ever stepped out the air conditioned car.

       “You figure he offed himself?” he asks.

       The woman scoffs. “A machine can’t terminate itself. It can’t feel.” She tucks the device under her arm and peers over the cliff. 

       The man shuffles up to her and gazes down with some dizziness. “It just turned into sea foam, then.”

       The woman narrows her eyes at the waves, expecting some clue to the disappearance. Then, deciding the unit has been disposed of, begins to walk back.

       “Maybe,” the man starts, “they developed some form of consciousness? Humor me for a second.” He walks after the woman. “If I have only my own consciousness to go on, having only indirect access to the inner lives of others, how do I know you’re conscious the same way I am? Or are you a zombie who can walk and talk like a human although nobody is home?”

       The woman raises an eyebrow. It is a pointed question she usually expects from novice journalists advocating robotic rights like it was never a contradiction. “Having the ability to reflect on the past, to make predictions, feeling empathy, dreaming, knowing we will die… All this makes up our consciousness. A silicon-based machine can never hope to produce consciousness.” 

       Her impatience clips and thins out her words and the conversation is cut short. They make their way down the beaten path and climb back into their car.

       There is an island in Greece where the hills are somnolent and the air is lazy, the fountains gurgle brightly, and the people’s cheer is silhouetted against white and blue. Yet even under the sun, darkness pools under laurels, insects flourish in the rot of overripe fruit, and deep-rooted shadows stretch behind houses. Beyond the village, graveyards spill into pastures where bald spots of dirt meet dewy green. Even in Lipsi the shadows of death closely follow the idle merriment of nymphs.