Do you remember the cold hands, the touch of a mother, reaching for you? Reaching into you, from your deepest wound, cauterizing your withering soul? The caress through every vein in your body, restoring what you had lost so unceremoniously? The feeling of reclaiming life in its fullest, that so precious few have been lucky enough to experience?

  You must not. You remember so little. And you know that every memory forgotten is a memory that in effect never existed. Present identity is supposed to be the product of choices and circumstances past, but you don't have any. Not this you, at least. Cloud Strife did. But what are you?

  That pain you feel every time you forget, that is you trying to fight. You try to fend off and run from the truth like a coward, like a child who's scared of the dark. But you never can. Not when you are the truth walking. It is not an external entity chasing you that you hide from; the dark is you.

  Your every thought, every secret, weakness and scar, is laid bare. And everybody can see how empty you are. There is nothing to be found behind your green eyes, or under your enhanced skin. They could peel you apart under an operating table, and see nothing but a vacant skeleton and poisoned brain.

  Poison is the agent inhabiting your hollow shell, and you are poison's instrument, spreading poison in abundance. You can see it for yourself, can't you? Look up, into that beautiful, desolate starless night sky.

  The tremendous mako reactor, an insurmountable titan of human design, rattling within its bowels. One muffled boom underground, followed by a bigger one. The sound of popping rising further up like fireworks, and spreading. One thundering blast after another. The green hue beaming from the reactor's mouth amidst the plumes of smoke turning orange.

  Bursts of fire breaking out from the surface of the reactor, trailing up from the ground level, followed by the grand finale: the top erupting into a blinding flash of light, a fireball great enough to exact its irresistible destruction on the entire infrastructure. Grander than any light the reactor ever produced.

  Utter perfection; an artificial sun casting across Midgar, the thunderous wave of sound and dust rippling its own path of destruction through the civilian streets. Fractional pieces of that glorious sun casting out from the reactor's shattered mouth, a shower of fiery debris across the neighboring sectors. All of their lights blacking out, washing in the ultimate oppression of night's darkness.

  Everything has been broken. A shining beacon to Shinra dominance, to human ingenuity and opportunism, shattered, along with all it represented to those it towered over. You are their champion now. You toppled their giant.

  There are still seven more of them encircling Midgar, of course. But they are yours now. You remember the Shinra capitol in the center dominating the skyline, and picture yourself standing atop it, the rightful deity over the decadant failure of a civilized people beneath you. There's nothing you more desire or feel more entitled to than that high perch.

  But that won't be you. You are just an outsize idiot like everybody else, like the people who already live in that tower. You won't become bigger by standing in a high place. Behind all the symbolic grandeur of that tower is just another wasteful vanity crafted by small men seeking high perches.

  Everyone wants to be the guy on the perch. But they're not the guy. You're not the guy. Nobody is.

  Imagine peace; existing in nothingness, but without pain; all things sharing equal insignificance. Imagine drifting among the stars, seeing only dots on a black canvas, and being materially the same as them.

  But you can't do any of that. You can't even see the stars here. A sky of mako smoke hovering oppressively over you, and a big plate with a city on top of it to smother you too. The only bright dots in Midgar are the ones exuding from a leaking mako pipe.

  There's someone who waits at a leaking pipe like that. They kneel in front of it, protected by darkness in an urban alleyway, but the glow of the green particles fluttering from the cracks faintly illuminates their face. They must be familiar to you.

  You know where the pipe is. You should find it again. You should find her.

  Listen to that ring in your ears. The alarms are blaring. You are still weak and depleted. Still a small and empty vessel. But it's not too late to feel that sweet mother's embrace again. The path to the lost memory of wholeness can still be found.

  Now wake up. You spent a few too many minutes in that reactor huffing mako fumes.

  Cloud sharply inhaled and opened his eyes, but still only saw black. He choked on the dust he just breathed in and sat up. A shock pounding in his brain nearly knocked him back down.

  "There he is," he heard Jessie say. A flashlight blared in his eyes, and a hand suddenly grabbed his and yanked him up to his feet. He fell against a wall wingeing from his rankled head. "Mornin'."

  The flashlight shone elsewhere, and he could see they were stuck in a dark collapsed tunnel. It looked like an underground walkway to a train station. He saw Barret, along with Wedge and Biggs. Biggs was sitting against the wall, one leg of his shorts damp with blood, while the others were picking apart a pile of rubble blocking the tunnel.

  This didn't feel right. This wasn't the place he should have been. He wasn't in a tunnel before, nor with Wedge and Biggs. What happened to the 20-minute timer? The wrecked reactor core? Or escaping the encircling Shinra forces? What the hell was this?

  The rancid taste of smoke and mako still burned in his mouth. The pounding in his head got worse the more he tried to fill in the missing time. He couldn't do it. Once again, he was waking up somewhere random and left to hopelessly piece events back together. And once again, he couldn't.

  Only moments ago, and already lost. The angrier he became trying to remember, the more he punched at the ground, the more his remaining memories became uncertain and slipped away. He had looked away for one second to find something else, and the picture disappeared. It was pointless.

  Jessie was dabbing a rag on her bleeding swollen face, and looked back at an anxious Cloud. "You alright?"

  "What happened?"

  "Like... just now? You hit your head, or something?"

  "We were in the reactor core. And then..."

  "Oh. Musta gotten knocked pretty hard. We, uh, had to jump off the catwalk at the reactor entrance into the safety net, then cut half of it loose and swung for our lives into the subway tunnel below."

  "Not before we kicked ass on the way out!" Wedge added. "Can't believe we got through all of that, hiring you was the best decision we've ever made. We would be so dead on our own."

  "Yep," Jessie continued, "and we were on route to the surface of Sector 8 when the bomb went off, and fucked the whole place up. Now we're stuck here."

  Biggs weakly chuckled. "Man. I know we talked about a chain reaction from that bomb, but... goddamn. That felt like it could have leveled a whole city block."

  "The whole sector's gotta be blacked out. Just imagine the chaos that'll be up there when their precious modern amenities are taken away."

  "The whole sector could be fuckin' toast for all we know." Biggs was gripping the bloody side of his shorts. There was a hole in them, and his thigh was bandaged under it, as was his shin.

  "You got shot," Cloud said.

  "Yup. By that goddamn ninja guy who attacked you. On the same leg the fuckin' hound bit me, no less. Safe to say I'm gonna be walking like a cripple for the next few weeks. But you took of care of that prick for me, though."

  He didn't remember any hounds attacking them in the reactor. But that didn't matter.

  "We took care of him, thank you," Jessie corrected.

  "And your face took the beating of a fuckin' lifetime doing it, miss. Don't hold your breath on any guys at the bar making moves on you for a while."

  She laughed and beamed the flashlight into his eyes. "Fuck you. I'll just pamper a bunch of makeup on it."

  Charming.

  Jessie spun her flashlight around in boredom as Barret and Wedge worked on the rubble, until Barret decided to stop and walked back to stare down at Cloud. "Tell me, merc. That man who attacked us in the reactor core, was he one of your SOLDIER comrades?"

  He could clearly remember that man's skin breaking at his sword, his neck crushing under his fingers, him failing to physically overpower Cloud. That wasn't SOLDIER material. But the way he fought like Cloud's equal regardless, perfectly protecting himself in a one v. one, showed a different kind of training. Cloud knew exactly where that came from.

  He answered, "No."

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  "Well then who the hell was he?! It wa'nt no civilian that beat the shit outta all you!"

  "The Investigation Sector of the Shinra General Affairs Department. Also known as the Turks. Shinra's top spy agency."

  Biggs gawked, "He was a Turk. You're shitting me."

  "No wonder you got your ass kicked," Jessie teased.

  "Hey, I'll just say, I went toe to toe with a Turk on my own, and lasted more than eight seconds. I think that's pretty fuckin' good. And I came out of it looking better than you did."

  "Well we killed a Turk. Capital K. While we blew up a mako reactor. I'm feeling pretty good too."

  It was strange to Cloud that some ragtag eco-terrorist cell knew about the Turks. People's first introduction to them tends to be right before a bullet or a bag comes for their head.

  Wedge called to Barret, "Hey! I still need help here!"

  Barret replied, "Get back," and aimed his gun arm at the rubble. Wedge jumped away, and he unloaded on the blockade. Rapid flashes of light colored the tunnel, and chunks of concrete broke apart. Cloud noticed that the impacts against the stone were little red and purple explosions, the sign of something magic-tinted rather than bullets. His gun never reloaded or discharged shell casings either.

  Once the first glimmers of light from the city outside peaked through the top, he stopped firing. Jessie butted in front of him holding a block of C4 and said, "I've got the rest of it! Everyone, make room!"

  They ran back more than a safe distance as Jessie swiped away broken rocks and planted the bomb in the middle. She retreated with the others, but before she could hit the detonator, the lights in the tunnel flickered back to life.

  She fumed, "What the hell? The power grid should be down!"

  Cloud said, "The reactor is down. The power grid can connect with the neighboring sectors during emergencies."

  Jessie sighed in disappointment. Now there weren't any lost amenities to feel smug about. "Whatever."

  She looked away, pressed the detonator, and the rubble was blasted out of the tunnel in a spew of fire. She, Biggs, and Wedge wooed in celebration and rushed outside.

  As Wedge passed over the remnants of the blockade, a faulty unexploded chunk of the bomb sprayed fire just behind him and set the back of his shirt alight. He yelped, "Aw, shit!" and ran around outside flailing his arms to pat it out.

  Biggs shouted, "Stop drop and roll! Stop drop and roll!" Wedge tumbled onto the ground and rolled back and forth until it was properly smushed out.

  Cloud stepped out, and took in the burning landscape of the Sector 8 upper city. The great metropolitan district, the center of Midgar's service economy, skyscrapers and neon lights and brick roads, shops and attractions and luxury condos and hotels, fallen to the rain of fire from the reactor.

  Smoke billowed in the air, carried by wind. Infrastructure all around sat cracked and ruined from chunks of reactor debris. Active fires in their early stages burned on the ground level and on higher building floors, painting the sector a deep orange. Cars on the street ahead laid overturned. Windows everywhere were shattered. The screams of civilians and car alarms echoed.

  Behind all of that, the reactor itself. The monstrous behemoth in the sky, once a giant seeking to stomp him out, defeated and broken. Its mouth in burning shambles, spewing clouds of ash rather than gas. It was almost sad to see it this way. So grand and mesmerizing with the evil it once represented, and dead.

  The team looked at the scene of destruction in awe. It was real world consequence of their own doing, something they must feel rarely. Biggs whistled, "Holy shit. I don't know whether to be really terrified or really proud. This is fuckin' crazy."

  "Did we do all this?" asked Wedge, his voice slightly cracking.

  Barret glanced at Jessie. "Think you overdid the bomb a little?"

  She stared out, looking captivated by the ruin. "Me? Who the hell knows."

  A moment of silence for them to appreciate the scale of what was "accomplished." Cloud was eager for the night to be over with.

  Barret flipped into speech mode. "Hmph. Well, we've bought the planet a bit more time. But remember, that clock is still tickin'. It took a lot of work just to bring down one of these reactors, but the planet ain't gonna be safe until we shut down all the damn reactors! And tonight, a clear message has been sent to the Shinra Electric Power Company: people out there are still willin' to fight, and we're not goin' anywhere! There's no shining monument to tyranny they can build that we can't tear back down!"

  Biggs smirked and said, "Yeah. No time to sit around gawking here. It's only gonna get uglier from here on out. You spend decades raping the land, and this is what happens."

  Wedge said, "We'll make them buckle eventually. They're definitely gonna be listening to us after tonight!"

  Jessie's swollen face gave an expectant look at Cloud. "So long as we've got the right help along the way!" Cloud didn't reciprocate. "Hypothetically."

  How fascinating for them to talk like they were inevitable. Only luck carried them this one step. They possess no special talents or ingenuity or manpower, yet want to take dozens more steps on their own. He could see their hype carrying them for about another month at the longest before they're found and snuffed out.

  Cloud interjected, "If we're done now, I'll take my payment."

  Barret scowled. "You'll have your damn gil when we're back at base. Show a little patience."

  He sighed. "Then we should stop hanging around here and move. Public Security's gonna have the whole sector locked down to find us."

  "On that much, we agree. Everyone, split up and rendezvouz at the train station! We got 15 before the last ride to Sector 7 takes off!"

  "On it!" they agreed collectively. And the four of them scattered in different directions down the road.

  Cloud kept standing there for a moment too long, staring at nothing. He choked out another mako-tinted breath and shook back awake, taking off into the city with no clear path.

  Loudspeakers in the street blared, "ATTENTION ALL RESIDENTS. THIS IS AN ALERT FROM SHINRA EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER. A DISASTER WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR SECTORS 1 AND 8. MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED AT MAKO REACTOR 1. HAZARDOUS GAS MAY BE SPREADING IN THE AREA. DEBRIS FROM THE EXPLOSIONS HAS DAMAGED PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE NEAR THE SITE, AND MULTIPLE FIRES ARE ONGOING. EVACUATION ORDERS ARE IN EFFECT FOR RESIDENTS IN DISTRICTS 11, 12, 15, 16, AND 17. FOR THE SAFETY OF YOURSELF AND YOUR COMMUNITY, REMAIN OUT OF ROADS AND AWAY FROM DEBRIS TO ALLOW ROOM FOR EMERGENCY SERVICES."

  People were piled into the roads anyway, and emergency services were nowhere to be seen. The yuppies were out in droves, crying at the horror of their glamorous sparkling city block defaced by a level of ruin the average undercityman would sneeze at. Few were injured, those that were sporting only a few scrapes or gashes that would heal within the month.

  A burning car beneath a posh cursive-lettered sign for a restaurant felt vaguely poetic to Cloud, though it, like everything else here under lamplight, probably meant nothing.

  Most buildings he passed were undamaged. Some had caught small fireballs that burned on the exterior walls but didn't spread inside. Shinra helicopters were circling the reactor fallout zone, others hung around a burning skyscraper spraying water.

  He moved along with a loose crowd of people fleeing the district, flowing and converging through the streets like a gold-speckled river. They were all a bunch of contemporaries and suits fitted like it's prom night, some hauling children. They bumped into and tripped over each other scrambling to their safety net. A small boy stood alone on the sidewalk crying out, "Mom! Mom!", drowned out by the shrieking of others and echoing alarms. Nobody stopped for him. Cloud wasn't about to either.

  Public Security troops were parked ahead ushering people into the safe zone. There was no doubt the army had everyone on lookout for him and the others, so he broke off to a different street, fighting against the current of fleeing suits.

  The first mostly empty place it led him to was the fabled Loveless Avenue, home of the theater that exclusively performs its titular play. Neon lit brick roads and cinematic posters and artwork would woo their moth-like visitors into believing the hype of the production in a different hour. Perhaps its 250th performance was being held before the reactor that powered the theater exploded.

  Loveless was the shining achievement of Midgar's art world, the play and the poetry book it's based on. It's ostensibly a medieval tale of a nebulous mechanical city called Guardia, three knights, two of them getting killed, the last one having a romantic escapade, and a nebulous Goddess. No one has been able to pinpoint when or by whom the book was written, what the story was meant to represent, or why it was written, creating a grand mystery that has become a mythology of its own stretching decades.

  The verses are written incoherently, it shambolically applies the tropes of good writing while not using them in an interesting way, no real world ideas or concepts are explored, it fails to follow a narrative, and its non-ending is a joke. By every objective measure it's a failure of storytelling, but it's dressed up in the right emotive words and format to feel like what a masterpiece should be. It's the perfect vague and linguistically flowery canvas for millions around the world to assign significance to every word of; so vague that even the most outlandish interpretations are taken seriously by media.

  Its lauding critics roleplay as intellectuals, reciting classy language they learned in university to project meaning onto vapid concepts such as "the gift of the Goddess" and "silent sacrifice." The Loveless play has succeeded as Midgar's staple because its writers took creative liberty filling in blanks of the poem to create something narratively coherent for a general audience. It's a product more than a work of art, but now it has become the focus for even lower discussion and interpretation among people too confused to read the poem.

  An insipid tale has created a fittingly insipid intellectual hierarchy. The uneducated philistines bicker about the trite entertainment spectacle of the play, while the upper crusts with degrees debate on a "deeper" level about the meaning of an equally trite book. But on every level, all of the story's artistic discourse is only a vehicle for self-indulgence. They don't seek to unlock any mystery of life, the planet, or society, but to decode symbols solely within the context of the story.

  And that's the way Shinra likes it. This is the art form and intellectual hobnobbing they encourage, while nearly all other literature from the old Republics and Empires predating Shinra's formation are stripped from public access. Former generations worked on questions surrounding human freedom, autonomy, the lifestream, and religion. But the places for those conversations are in ruins. The modern era deals over questions about a fictional "gift of the Goddess" and not getting killed by monsters.

  On an ordinary day, the colorful lights and art on Loveless Avenue might have been enough to enthrall Cloud's weak mind too. But now fiery ashes blew down the city block across layers of shattered glass and fleeing civilians, and the veil was tarnished. This sight was nothing to believe in. The meaning of Loveless carried no weight underneath a sky of embers.

  Staring at the bright and proud sign above Loveless Theatre made something flash and burn to life in his head. It brimmed with electricity the longer he stared. It kept flaring and swelling, shaking and burning, and he couldn't look away. It was the same bloodshot feeling; that thing wriggling around that's not supposed to be there. The neon red turned redder, the embers turned to little fires, and they grew, and grew, and grew.

  The destructive heat searing his face. Sweat smothering him underneath his clothes. Lungs heavy. Throat choked with the rotten taste of ash.

  A house that he knows. Fences that can protect nothing. The wind blowing sparks through the sails of an old windmill. Empty spaces in the air, toppled ruins beneath them.

  Everything beloved, gone. Gone, but still there in front of him, all around him, taunting him in their last moments of existence before their husks are consumed as well.

  No... it's not a taunt. It's a warning. The inferno does not destroy indiscriminately—it takes, swallowing only what belongs to it, and destroying everything in the way. Cloud was in the middle of it. A silhouette stood within the enclosing storm. It was coming to take him too.

  He gasped in a feeble breath and ran away.