THE CORE OF ME

PART I: You Promised You’d Come Back

The sun bore down like a punishment.

Makena stood at the edge of the temple ruins, the blocks of her arms trembling, seams between each digital edge flexing with tension. Heat shimmered across the cracked landscape, bending the world into ripples, like reality itself wanted to disappear.

She had been waiting. For hours? Days? Time didn’t pass properly here anymore. Not since Kai went in.

“I’ll be back before sunset,” Kai had said, voice calm, lips pressed tight. “You’re not going in alone, are you?” Makena had asked, heart thudding. “Not alone. The Core will be with me. I have to try. For us.”

For us.

Now Makena stared at the altar, cracked and humming.

The desert sand around it wasn’t red.

It was pixelated green-blue, like a bleeding wound remembered in broken code.

“Kai?”

No answer. The sky didn’t care. The world shimmered again. Then she saw it.

A figure, stumbling out of the ruin.

Its body was RYB yellow. Rubber-like. Its limbs were stretched too long, canary yellow arms bending in impossible angles. Its eyes were white voids with small, black pupils, and its smile was too wide, trembling.

“Hello! Have we met?”

Makena froze. Her stomach dropped through the world.

“Kai...?”

The figure winced. Its cartoon eyes blinked out of sync, smile twitching.

“K... Kai. That word.."”

It clutched its head. Then it screamed.

Its scream was broken glass in audio form, high-pitched and masculine, like a cartoon character glitching into a sob.

Then it vomited.

Chunks of data, glowing entrails, memory shards, Makena’s face flickering in and out of them.

She dropped to her knees.

“You’re in there. I know you are. Please remember me.”

The thing doubled over, hands on the ground, glitching violently. Tears fell from his eyes, but they rendered incorrectly, falling in cubes.

“I’m... I’m X. Not Kai. I’m not anyone anymore.”

---

PART II: Kai and the Core

Earlier.

Kai had stood before the Core alone. It pulsed like a heart, nested in data roots that climbed from the temple floor like veins.

She reached out.

And the Core opened.

Light stabbed into her skull. She couldn’t scream. Her throat locked.

Bones cracked in her limbs. Not like snapping twigs, no, like someone taking apart her skeleton and trying to reassemble it in the wrong shape.

Her braid unraveled, hair sloughing off into black ink, pixelating midair.

Her skin peeled in layers, sliding off to reveal glistening yellow beneath, not flesh, not muscle, something else.

She vomited. First blood. Then code. Then her own name.

Her hands spasmed into mitts. Her fingers stretched like rubber.

“Makena…” she whispered, voice rising into a higher register, glitching. “I’m sorry-”

She blinked.

And forgot who Makena was.

---

PART III: Makena and the Core

“You’re lying!” Makena shouted. “You are Kai! You’re what the Core did to her!”

X twitched.

“If you touch it, it will erase you too,” he whispered. “It makes you laugh while you fall apart.”

Makena’s eyes burned.

“Then maybe that’s what I deserve.”

She ran for the altar.

X shrieked, voice shredding.

“If you forget me-”

She touched it.

The Core sang.

Pain, white-hot and intelligent, sliced through her skull. A drill in her teeth, in her brain, in her soul.

She screamed.

Blood poured from her nose, then her eyes. Then it wasn’t blood.

Her body ruptured. Her back arched. Her ribs snapped outward and reshaped.

Flesh shattered into voxels.

Her skin turned blue, first curious blue, then her limbs flushed into Picton blue. Her fingers turned sharp, dagger-like.

Her voice bent in real time, deepening slightly, becoming foreign.

“I’m… Four.”

She collapsed.

---

PART IV: Not Who We Were

X found her, him now, hours later.

They sat beneath a glitched tree.

“I think I dreamed about a girl,” Four said.

“Dark skin. Red pants?” X asked.

“Yes.”

“She used to say my name like it meant something.”

“Do you remember it?”

“It started with K.”

“Mine had an M, I think.”

They touched hands.

Neither cried.

They just ached.

---

PART V: Rewriting the Past

Time became irrelevant.

They forgot more every cycle. Who Kai was. Who Makena had been.

They remembered instead:

• Algebralien school.

• Childhood games.

• Being born of the Core.

“Can you believe some people think we were human?” Four laughed, daggered fingers curled.

“What would that even be like?” X replied.

But sometimes, X touched the spot where his braid had once hung.

Sometimes, Four drew hearts when he wasn’t thinking. Blue on yellow.

---

PART VI: The Only Thing That Matters

They kissed beneath that pixel tree.

“You make me feel funny,” Four whispered.

“Like what?”

“Like I forgot something important. But when I’m with you… it doesn’t matter.”

“You’re the only thing real here.”

Their hands clung to each other like the last threads of who they once were.

Makena and Kai were gone.

But love didn’t go anywhere.

---

THE END (but not really)

Deep in the Core, beneath the layers of corrupted memory and rewriting cycles.

Two girls still hold hands in the dark.

Even if no one remembers them...

Love does.