AEGIS 2149

Data has no taste, and synthetic glass never holds the warmth of human fingers.

That was what I kept telling my students at the History Department of the University of Montréal-Centre, three mornings a week, in an amphitheater where not a single gaze met mine. Their eyes did not see me. Their irises, traversed by violet glows and luminous micro-notifications, scanned invisible streams of data, injected directly into their optic nerves by Bio-Tech Corp’s top-tier implants. When a young man in the front row modified the color of his pupils with a simple blink to match the shade of his chrome jacket, I simply adjusted the collar of my real wool coat.

In this year 2149, being one of the last men without a chip, without a spinal connector, and without an artificial retina was not a philosophy. It was a form of silent resistance. A refusal to surrender the feel of the real world to the network.

When I stepped through the door of the restaurant Au Vieux Saint-Laurent, nestled in a brick alcove of the intermediate level, the holographic sign of an optical prosthetics shop swept across my face. The advertising sensor on the facade crackled for an instant, attempting to identify a digital signature in my dermis. Finding nothing—no credit identifier, no implant profile—the projector passed me by with a mechanical hum, preferring to target a passerby whose right eye flickered in time with data transfers.

I went in. The scent of waxed wood and wine sauce hung in the room.

Éléonore was already waiting at our usual table, near the bay window overlooking the lower domes. She was wearing her little green knit sweater, slightly frayed at the elbows—a garment that had a history, a texture, a memory.

“Still ranting against your students’ optics?” she asked without looking up, a soft smile deepening the two small dimples at the corners of her lips.

“They no longer know what real paper looks like,” I said as I sat down across from her. “If the power outage from Level -4 were to spread up here, half of them would forget how to breathe.”

Éléonore let out her small, stifled laugh—that particular laugh that always ended with a whistling micro-pause, a tiny quirk in her breathing that only I knew. Our ritual.

She placed her hand on mine. Her skin was warm. Not the thermostat-regulated warmth of synthetic tissues, but the true warmth of blood.

“Ten years, Stéphane,” she murmured, staring at the little beeswax candle placed between our two plates. “Ten years that we’ve been surviving their machines.”

“Ten years that you’ve been stopping me from becoming as rigid as my old books.”

She grabbed a piece of traditional bread, breaking it gently.

“Do you remember our first date? At the abandoned library on Level 12? You spent forty minutes explaining to me the difference between the fall of the Roman Empire and the first processor crisis of 2088. I nearly left three times.”

“But you stayed.”

“I stayed because you had flour on your nose and you were desperately trying to look serious in a coat twice too big for you. And because you gave me a real coffee, without chemical substitutes.”

She slid her fingers under my wrist, finding my pulse, her thumb tracing slow, small circles on my skin. It was her way of telling me that everything was fine, even when the Aegis patrol sirens were screaming three stories below. We talked about the plan to buy a small plot of land outside the city domes, where the sky wasn’t filtered by polarized glass plates. We laughed. We took our time.

At 10:15 PM, we paid in physical coins—a rare privilege that made the waiter with the neck full of access ports click his tongue in disdain—then we walked out into the alley.

The night air was heavy, saturated with a fine, lukewarm rain that made the asphalt shimmer under the reflection of neon signs.

“Give me just two minutes, my love,” Éléonore said, rummaging in the inner pocket of her coat.

She pulled out a pack made of creased cardboard. A hand-rolled cigarette made with dark tobacco. A bad habit, expensive and outdated, but one she cherished as her last space of freedom against the neural vaporizers flooding the market.

“I’ll wait for you there,” I replied, leaning against the brick wall of the restaurant.

She pulled a match from her box. The scraping of the sulfur produced a sharp spark, then a real little yellow flame flared up. For a second, that warm, flickering glow lit up her face, casting soft shadows on her cheekbones and making her dark eyes shine.

That is the exact image my brain recorded. The last one.

Suddenly, the little flame guttered in a gust of cold air.

An ultra-light delivery drone had just swerved abruptly over the alley, its floodlights sweeping the wet asphalt. In the reflection of a puddle at my feet, I saw two silhouettes emerge from the shadow of a recycling container.

Two men. Worn leather coats, jerky gait, faces partially disfigured by cheap implants that blinked with a yellowish, unstable glow. The eyes of one of them betrayed the erratic gaze of those addicted to synaptic discharges.

“Éléonore...,” I said in a low voice, stepping forward.

“Your chips!” the first man croaked, pulling a makeshift weapon from his pocket. “Your IDs! Empty your accounts, now!”

His arm was shaking uncontrollably.

“Calm down,” Éléonore intervened, dropping her cigarette, hands raised to shoulder height. “Look at my wrists. We don’t have anything...”

“No chips?!” the second attacker screamed, spitting on the ground. “Everyone has connected credits! Are you making fools of us?!”

“It’s the truth!” I said, suddenly stepping between the barrel of the weapon and Éléonore. “Take my wallet. There’s paper, real cash, take everything!”

The armed man’s cybernetic eye emitted a shrill hiss, turning blood-red. His artificial pupil contracted in an involuntary spasm. A short circuit. A moment of panic.

The gunshot didn’t sound like the dry noise in movies. It was a heavy thud, followed by a hot breath that swept across my face.

I didn’t see Éléonore fall. I only heard the soft impact of her body against the brick, then the sound of the rain continuing to beat against the asphalt.

“ÉLÉONORE!”

I lunged toward her, but a second gunshot tore through the night.

A violent impact slammed into the back of my neck. It wasn’t a burn; it was an impact of unbelievable violence, as if a mass of steel had just shattered my cervical vertebrae. My legs gave way instantly. Air refused to enter my lungs.

My face hit the wet asphalt, a few centimeters from Éléonore’s hand.

I saw her fingers. I saw the little cigarette still smoking in the puddle. I wanted to reach out to grab her hand. I wanted to scream to her that I was there. But my brain was sending orders into the void: my nerves no longer responded. Not a single muscle moved.

The sound of the attackers’ footsteps moved away down the alley.

Beside me, Éléonore’s breath stopped with a slight whistling noise. Her hand went still.

The rain continued to fall on our two frozen bodies, until the neon light became nothing more than a red dot, then a thread, then silence.