But Leila’s heart turned again and she could not turn over the codes. The Order was furious as the sim projection of Apollo and Daphne was unbreakable. And the statue itself being only consciousness as well, was also unbreakable. It stood whether they wanted it or not. An imposition on the city.

  “Just like an Arc de Triumph in Rome or Paris….” Leila said.

  Now Leila awaited a new trial with a harsher sentence. “Why don’t you link me back and just let my brain atrophy with time?” she begged. So I can reclaim him…

  “That would be a gift you don’t deserve,” the prosecutor said. “And worse, you show no remorse or accountability for what you have done…how long will the Art Directive hold before AA is rendered obsolete in the face of these sims?”

  Dark days passed and the evening before her new sentencing, Dr. Ron arrived to pay a final visit in her prison quarter.

  “I heard your article was widely published,” Leila said.

  “Yes. But my conscious chases me at night. And so it chased me all the way here tonight.” He was a middle aged man whose hair seemed to have greyed almost over night.

  “They shut down your quantum link program,” she added.

  “Yes, well that’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.” And he withdrew from his pocket a small golden square and held it up. “This is the quantum computer that can link you back for good, Leila. We can do it here as I took care not to remove your chip, and made others forget that I didn’t remove it.” He winked mischievously.

  “Yes! Yes!” Leila beamed.

  The doctor smiled a bittersweet smile. He will miss her. All this time she was like the daughter he never managed to have.

  “Now, now, although guilt moved me to come here today, I also have my own selfish reasons for studying digital beings inside a sim. The only problem is that once they will find out—tomorrow—they will very quickly seek a court injunction to sever your brain as they will be unable to unlink you. You will die eventually—either by court injunction or with time. But by then your consciousness would have been projected into the sim.”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  He will miss her. And fought with himself for getting her involved in the program. But at the same time—jealous he didn’t have the courage to link himself.

  “I say this Leila because there is no going back. Don’t tell me the sim codes. I don’t want to know them. And the neural link only you can break. And if one day you do, and you find yourself still standing in the sim, you will know that your body has died and there’s nothing for you to come back to.”

  Leila stood up, teary eyed and grabbed the bars of her cell.

  “There’s nothing for me to come back to. But a life of love and art awaits me in the sim.”

  I will not cede to Proserpina.

  ***

  Back in the workshop, after Leila left the sim, Michael could not bring himself to lift the chisel or to will anything else. He understood that he was dead and spent his days wondering if he died before Leila was linked on Earth or after.

  Did she know I was dead or not?

  Initially he was sure that she knew. And since he gave her the sim codes he waited for the sim to collapse. She was one of them. From The Order, in the service of the Art Directive of Artificial Art.

  Everything she did here, he thought—and finally posing as Daphne—was just to convince him to unlink and give her the codes.

  And she did it. And Michael resigned to his fate. Soon his digital consciousness would be turned off and nothing of him would endure.

  Except his sculpture as a file in the database.

  But even this. Would she remain true to her word?

  But as the months passed and nothing happened, Michael understood that something went wrong. And wrong meant that she didn’t know he was dead beforehand and that she did not betray him.

  Yet still, he remained alone, and unable to help her in her fight in the base reality.

  Helpless, Michael joined the visiting-entities in the gallery and walked with them endlessly on a loop, day and night.

  Round and round and round and round.

  ***

  And so one day after many months of circling the Borghese Gallery, a girl by the name of Leila came and took Michael’s hand and walked with him.

  She smiled infectiously with big brown Bedouin eyes and said: “Suffering is temporary my love, but glory is forever.”

  “You came back.” And he cupped her face in his hands.

  “The question is not why I came back, but why I came here in the first place?”

  Hades and Proserpina towered over them. As the visiting entities circled round and round, at times walking straight through them.

  “Alright then, why?”

  Envy.

  “I had to meet the man who consecrate five years of his life to the loving of a statue.” And she lifted her eyes to the famous Bernini sculpture.

  But I won Proserpina, I won.

  ***