The sky had been clear for days but Dimitri was certain an attack on the village was imminent. Under Ilya’s instruction, the villagers busied themselves with stacking sheets of plastic over the roofs. Rain sensors and an alarm system were put in place to warn against impending danger. They followed Ilya’s directive without question even though it went against their culture of welcoming the rain. They trusted Ilya with their lives. It was known that the poison caused plant growth upon contact with human skin. What was uncertain was the effect that would have on their prosthetic fittings.

Every time it rained, Ilya diligently tested the water sample. Each time returned a negative result, it meant another day that her village was safe.

Things weren’t so fortunate for the village of Aierya. The visitor returned after a few months passed with no news from Ilya about an antidote. He was charged with rage.

“You didn’t tell me you had found a solution.”

“I haven’t.”

“Then why does he look exactly the same as the last time I saw him?” He pointed accusingly.

“We told you before, the condition will stagnate on its own.”

“You failed to mention that not everybody would be so lucky,” the man said accusingly.

“What do you mean?” Ilya’s question launched Arthur into a tirade of blame and lamentation.

It was true that the condition reached a plateau, but that only applied to a few fortunate individuals. The majority of the afflicted saw the green spread fervently all over their bodies until they lost any physical semblance of a human. It wouldn’t be long after that before the growths consumed them from the insides and turned them into full vegetation.

Ilya was shocked upon the revelation but was careful not to show it. Presently, there was nothing she could do for the man except to provide reassurance.

“I’m very sorry to hear that.” Ilya said calmly after the man had finished. She knew not to take to heart the accusations he had thrown at her, for the man’s words had been sharpened only by concern for his people. “But I cannot help you if you have no faith in my abilities. I stand nothing to gain by keeping the cure for you after I have discovered it. I told you the last time you were here that I would send you the remedy as soon as I have one. I’ll stick to my word. At the moment, I have some questions about the sickness. Your answers would be greatly helpful in accelerating my progress.”

The man nodded gruffly.

“Can you describe the demographic of the people?” Ilya asked slowly. “Whose condition stabilised? Who were the people unfortunately taken away?”

The man said that among those afflicted, the children and the old were the most vulnerable. Some of the adults were not spared too. Their families have been all but consumed by grief.

“Did they have spouses?” Dimitri spoke. All that time, he had remained silent by the side, listening.

“A few of them did,” the man replied, blinking at him. He was surprised by Dimitri’s question.

“Did they love them?”

“I don’t see how this is—”

“Dimitri is only trying to help. He was afflicted by the disease before your people, perhaps he might have insights on what information would be useful,” said Ilya.

The man thought for a moment. “No, I do not think they were in love. The ones who passed had relationships that were at best, lukewarm. Any tears shed were more out of duty than sorrow if I am being honest.”

Dimitri kept silent.

“Well?” the man asked impatiently.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know anything,” Dimitri said quietly.

“Bullshit!” Arthur cried. “You know something! I know you do. I can tell. There’s something you’re hiding and I want to know what it is!” The man lunged towards Dimitri.

Ilya got to her feet and placed herself in front of Dimitri, effectively shielding him.

The man restrained his anger. “Ilya, you’re protecting this disrespectful bastard?”

“He happens to be a guest in my village, as are you. I will not have any harm being afflicted upon anyone in this village. There is already enough we have to protect ourselves from even without us fighting with one another,” Ilya said firmly.

The man sat back down. “I’m only holding back for your sake,” he told Ilya.

“And for that, I thank you. If you trust me, then you’ll also believe in my trust in this man to tell us if he knows anything that might be helpful in finding a cure to the disease.” Ilya turned to Dimitri. “You will tell us, won’t you?” She had little doubt that Dimitri had already shared everything he knew about the Council and the illness. But she asked him anyway as a perfunctory gesture to placate Arthur.

Dimitri had enough sense to respond accordingly. He nodded. Fortunately, it seemed enough to mitigate Arthur’s anger.

“You didn’t come all this way just to ask for an update, did you?” asked Ilya.

The man nodded. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but these days, it’s all I seem to be.” Arthur sighed. “After my previous visit, my boys and I did some investigating on our own. We may not have as skilled a mediciner in our midst as you, but our people have developed a different sort of talent. We sent a few of our guys out to do some digging and they managed to tap onto the bastards’ radio transmission. They’re coming for you next. This village is their next target.”

“No, that’s impossible, they can’t possibly know we exist.”

“Believe me, I wish just as much as you that that isn’t true. But you know as well as I do that your village is as hidden as mine. If they can get to us, who’s to say they can’t get to you, too? I’m sorry we couldn’t get more intel. They discovered our presence and cut the transmission before we found anything useful.”

Ilya shook her head. “What you’ve done for us is more than enough. Thank you.”

“It’s nothing compared to what you’re trying to do for us.”

“I’ll find a cure. I will.”

“I know. You’ve never failed us, Ilya. We trust you.”

***

“I have something to confess,” said Dimitri.

Ilya’s eyes widened in surprise. “I thought you didn’t have any more information to share.” She thought Wynonna had thoroughly interrogated him after Arthur’s previous visit.

“There are some things… nothing concrete. They’re just theories.” Dimitri admitted, avoiding her gaze.

“Why didn’t you raise it when he was here?”

“Honestly? Because it’s absurd, and I didn’t think he would understand.”

“You also thought I wouldn’t either, huh,” said Ilya, slightly annoyed. She crossed her arms. “What changed your mind?”

“I didn’t think it was important. But after hearing what he said, my opinion has changed.”

Ilya didn’t know whether to feel angry or flattered. But she knew that neither emotion was worth dwelling into at the expense of the pressing issue. “Well?” she said, making an effort not to sound impatient. But her foot tapping effectively conveyed an appropriate level of displeasure.

Dimitri took a deep breath, before he started. “The spread of the disease started from the island I came from. They infected people on a voluntary basis. Some of them seemed to enjoy it at the start. I’m sure by now you have discovered the benefits of this green. But the thing about nurturing plants is that you don’t know how much it will grow, you don’t know when a tree will stop growing taller or when a flower will bloom. It turned out that the sample size was too small since the uptake was lower than expected. That’s when they started infecting people against their will. I escaped the island thinking that I was one of the lucky ones, only to find out a few days later that they had gotten to me too.” He choked on his words.

When Dimitri regained his composure, he continued. “It was apparent that the disease spreads at different speeds among different individuals, and that the disease stopped spreading only for some people. It was impossible to obtain information on the poison from the inventors, so a few of us thought to analyse the progress of this disease on our own. We came up with a few theories, none of them made much sense to me. One was particularly absurd…”

“What was it?”

“It’s going to sound ridiculous but, stay with me.” Another deep breath before he continued. “Although the plant parts seem to stop growing on the outside after a couple of weeks, they reach inwards after that. It appears to affect the consciousness. Of course all of this is just conjecture …”

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“Go on.”

“Well, now, I know this is going to sound crazy, but we had some theories. None were ever proven, but … of all the people on the island, only the couples seemed to retain their consciousness. The rest, well … they slowly turned into mindless zombies.”

“Wait, what do you mean?”

“Let me put it this way: They became unquestioning followers. The ideal servant to the Council. I know it doesn’t make sense. We’re talking about some of the world’s brightest minds. But it seems like nothing else but love could stop them from becoming that way.”

“Interesting. But the researchers of that status all bore a deep love for their work didn’t they? Wasn’t that enough to prevent their consciousness from degrading?”

“Passion for life is not the same as the passion of love. From what we gathered, there needs to be an overwhelmingly strong sense of care for another, a prioritising of a person above all else.”

“Why?”

“Who knows? Perhaps it’s that specific combination of hormones that are released when one is engulfed in sensations of being in love. It seems that sort of bond is what keeps the consciousness from slipping away. There’s nothing else, at least not anything that has yet been discovered, that’s powerful enough to keep the poison at bay. But that sounds ludicrous even to me no matter how many times I go over it in my head. The truth is anyone’s guess, really,” Dimitri explained. “It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

Ilya didn’t know what to say.

The fact that consciousness was directly in the picture changed everything. Ilya had been going about the problem the wrong way. It was time for a different approach.

So, the poison seeped into their consciousness, and allegedly the only ones unaffected are the people who have developed a genuine affinity for another person.

The Council had indeed come up with an ingenious plan. They had counted on the fact that humans were weak-minded, and that they were animals. It is an incredibly difficult task to find someone whom you love and who loves you back. Ilya hadn’t even experienced love for herself until she met someone like Dimitri. And what would have been her chances of that if she had stayed conservative and self-confined to her village?

There was also the other problem of making sure both people continued to love each other after the initial thrill if they wanted to retain their autonomy. There was a caveat though, wasn’t there? When people find out that their love is what’s keeping them truly alive, naturally, they’d hold on to it tighter than before, not realising that they’d be smouldering the beautiful thing they share. The stagnation of the mutated condition would only last for as long as the love does. Love dissipates over time, that was for sure, but sometimes, if people were lucky, it would last a lifetime. But the understanding of the mechanism behind the condition’s stagnation changes all that. Eventually, when it sinks in that the understanding that whatever love they thought was genuine has become a necessity, that’s when suspicions will begin to set in. And when one party begins to doubt whether their love is purely voluntary, the single quality which makes it real, it’d be the beginning of the end.

Ilya thought she must be out of her mind. Why was she entertaining this theory? There was no way the antidote would depend on such a cheesy mechanism. Yet, she thought it was genius.

Ilya had finally found her match. How could one find a solution to a problem like that?

The other night, when Ilya had realised The Council’s true motivation, she had gained some insight into their ambition. Today, she discovered their cruelty.

If The Council’s plan was indeed to let an AGI run the world, letting human consciousness seep into the abyss of nothingness was surely a key step in the right direction. There would be no more protests against data access, advocacy for privacy and the multitude of other regulations which were hindering the progress of AGI development and its eventual deployment. Because they completely trusted AGI, when it was finally created, to make decisions that would only benefit humanity so they expected everyone to trust it, too. Dimitri said that love was the single hope for salvation from the curse of the poison, but Ilya saw that the truth was much more sinister.

Love couldn’t be depended upon to save anything, for the simple reason that love could never be lasting. Most of the time, love is no more than a temporary fantasy, no better than wishful thinking. More and more people have come to realise that true love isn’t real. She had studied the subject far more than she cared to admit at a time when she had also bought into the idea of love just like everyone else.

People fall in love in a moment. For all the time after that, they fall in love with the idea of a person, and the idea of themselves being with them.

People change in an instant. In the middle of a conversation, people say things all the time that make the other party suddenly realise that they don’t recognise the person in front of them, they don’t know the person they thought they had. It is probably closer to the truth that they had fallen in love with an imaginative figment of a person who only existed for a moment. The crazy thing is, everyone knows that people change, yet they expect them not to.

In the past, people used to stay together out of commitment when love was no longer there. Now, they don’t see the point of doing even that. Love was bound to fail.

Dimitri was right when he said it was absurd that love could be the solution to this disease. Because it wasn’t. At best, it was a temporary fix.

The Council wanted to control the minds of everyone, for reasons which escaped Ilya. Not knowing the reasons for that motivation was not dire. All she knew was that all that talk about nudging the human race towards the direction of becoming a plant-human hybrid species for better efficiency and resource allocation was all just a farce, and that gave her enough justification to join in Dimitri’s cause. The Council had a different goal in mind from what they purported, Ilya was certain of that. An objective that required compliance from the world was far more sinister. Dimitri had mentioned the reason why they had plucked all those scientists from their homes and on the island in order to ensure they could no longer work on developing an AGI.

She was sure their goal—whatever it was—had something to do with that. They were either building one of their own, or they wanted to prevent its inception on this earth.

Ilya was well aware of the numerous worries surrounding the invention of an AGI. She had done ample research on her own in the process of building up Wynonna’s system. There were always two sides to everything. In every decision-making process, you just have to decide whether the perceived benefit outweighed the costs. The problem was, people are often blind to various variables involved. Unleashing an AGI into the world was definitely not a decision a single individual should make for the world, but Ilya liked to think the case with Wynonna was different.

She had set parameters to confine Wynonna to the boundaries of their little village. In the unlikely event that something should go wrong, that could guarantee that trouble wouldn’t spread to the other towns.

Ilya surmised the Council was made up of conservatives who held a strong conviction to prevent the technological singularity from ever happening. Ilya could understand their concern about the creation of an AGI, after all, it is often considered in the field to be synonymous with the beginning of a completely uncontrollable and unpredictable era. However, she could not accept that they would go to the extent of tampering with consciousness and eradicating autonomy in order to ensure their greatest fear would never come true.

It would be of little use to alert Dimitri and the rest about her shocking discovery. She would be wasting precious time by telling them, not to mention it would throw them into a needless flurry and they would brood over their bleak future for days. The more optimal option would be to carry on as if nothing had changed. Indeed, nothing had changed. It was improbable that the Council’s purpose for developing the poison had changed. Only her understanding of the matter had evolved.

Ilya put her hair up in a bun and got to work. The stronger and the more active the frontostriatal pathway is in the brain, the higher the level of self-esteem.

***

Ilya walked in on Dimitri trying to make carvings of his green skin again. It was late in the evening and the last rays of sun fell away within a few moments. He probably thought she had already retired for the night. Usually, she would turn around immediately and retreat back to where she came from. This time, she didn’t.

“Please stop that.”

Dimitri looked up, surprise written all over his face.

“Ilya, I can ex—”

“It breaks my heart seeing you do this to yourself,” she said. She tried to hold back her tears.

“Do you have a better solution?” Dimitri raised his voice.

Ily bit her lip and looked away. Despite the insights she had gained on the nature of the disease and the motivation behind its creation, Ilya got no closer to finding a cure. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, the task of finding a cure was proving more difficult than she had anticipated. She even suspected that the inventor of this poison had deliberately designed it so the endeavour of making a remedy would be exponentially more difficult than its creation.

Even when Ilya had been working on the creation of her Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) robot, she didn’t remember having faced such difficulty. In fact, things seemed to have progressed more smoothly than she had expected, though that may have been because she had been blessed with the best natural mutation anyone could ask for—a better brain.

For the first time, Ilya felt like she needed help. She didn’t like that feeling at all. It was the same sentiment by which she had acted on the impulse to send Wynonna away on that wild goose chase in the first place. But this thing was larger than herself. It pained her to see Dimitri suffer in disappointment with each passing day.

She felt like a hypocrite, having asked Dimitri to let her help him find a cure yet unwilling to reach out to Wynonna for her expertise when she was stuck.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you,” Dimitri said, his voice was more gentle than usual. He placed a hand on Ilya’s cheek, startling her.

“What?” Ilya realised her face was wet.

“Even though I don’t always express it, I really appreciate that you’re working so hard to find a cure for me. It was wrong of me to question you. I know you’re doing your best. And even though I know you’re the best shot I have at finding a cure, I don’t blame you if you never do. The odds are against you. It’s some of the best scientists who created this poison. They meant for its effects to be irreversible. Practically anyone who attempts to find a remedy is doomed to fail before they even start.”

“But I’m not just anyone,” said Ilya. “I’ll find a cure for you. I’ll find it if it’s the last thing I do,” she whispered.

“I love you.” Dimitri looked straight into her eyes. “Have I ever told you how I feel about you?”

“Yes. Even if you haven’t, It’s obvious enough.”

Dimitri chuckled. “I feel like I need to tell you again. Every day, I find myself falling for you even more.”

“I love you too,” said Ilya.

“Phew,” Dimitri said in mock relief. “I thought you weren’t going to say it back.” He grinned.

“Yet you said it to me,” she commented.

“Whether you say it back or not doesn’t affect how I feel about you.”

“Well, you were right. I wasn’t going to say it back.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I just thought if you love me then you should know how much it hurts me when you hurt yourself,” said Ilya. “Please don’t hurt yourself.”

“Okay. I won’t do it again.” Dimitri planted a kiss on her cheek. “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you,” he whispered.

“Me neither,” Ilya replied, eliciting a laugh from Dimitri. It sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world.

That night, Ilya sought help from the only person in the village who could possibly have a higher expertise than her in the matter.

“Why don’t you give it a go?”

Ilya tasked Wynonna with a new mission: To find a cure for Dimitri’s condition.

The creator watched as the creation’s eyes turned hazy, as if she were in a daze, then light returned to them within a few seconds and she spoke.

“I have not found the formula for an antidote, but I’ve figured out its constituents. You’ll need sandalwood. If you’re going to cure Dimtri. The amount we have on hand should probably be sufficient. But if you’re looking to send the remedy to a whole village of people and more, it’s going to take a lot more than we have ever had.”

“Of course it had to be something like that. Sandalwood is too expensive. The village doesn’t have any money. We’ll never find enough to buy enough for a whole world’s supply. Where can we start looking?”

“I know a place,” said Wynonna.

Ilya nodded. “Send me the coordinates,” she said. “I’ll set out tomorrow.”

Months of struggling had left Ilya just as clueless as she had been when she first started. Yet all it took for Wynonna was a matter of moments to figure out the solution. Granted, the solution Wynonna provided hadn’t been tried and tested yet, but based on Wynonna’s track record, it was highly probable that the droid would be right.

Ilya should have been happy. She should have been grateful. But all she felt then was a bit more of a bitterness that had been seeping into her heart ever since … well ironically ever since Ilya had tasked the droid to take over the evening shifts as the village doctor. It seemed more stark to Ilya than ever, that her creation was in some ways better than her. It brought her more discomfort than she had expected.