Reality settled around me like a thinner, colder version of the past. The interface faded to a soft glow. No alarms. No messages. Only the low thrum of Skyterra's systems humming through the floor.
I reached for the water.
The glass was cool in my hand. Beads of condensation slid down its side, catching the sterile ceiling light. I stared for a moment, then drank.
Cold. Clean. Flavorless.Yet alive.
Water is life. Not in a poetic way, but literally. Strip away wealth, technology, history. If you control water, you decide whether a species thrives or withers.
I am seventy-four this cycle.Biologically, closer to thirty. Twenty-nine on a good day.Med-grade genomic rebalancing and cellular scaffolding froze me in place decades ago. Science taught time to be polite. Water never listened.
I remember when purification meant reverse osmosis: push water through membranes, trap the toxins. It worked, but the energy cost was absurd. For every liter saved, two or three went to waste, depending on the source. We called that efficient. Efficiency meant sacrificing what we refused to see.
Then came thermal distillation: vaporize, condense, collect the clean vapor. Reliable for saltwater, but it demanded heat. Entire plants existed just to boil oceans. Environmentalists called it short-sighted. Economists called it scalable. Both were right.
Then we rose.
Here in the Sky Cities, we do not boil. We pull. Atmospheric harvesting rewrote the rules. Negative-pressure coils reach into the troposphere, paired with temperature-controlled nanogrids that condense vapor straight from the air. No salt. No heavy metals. No fingerprints.
Brilliant. Clean. Fragile.
If the intake algorithms glitch, if temperatures spike, if coils freeze or the grid hiccups, there is nothing stored. We keep no reservoirs. We catch water drop by drop, breath by breath.
People say we conquered scarcity. In truth, we dressed it in better clothes. We hid it.
I took another sip and let it sit on my tongue.Sterile. Perfect. Lifeless.
We turned water into a service. A subscription. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder what we lost when we stopped letting rivers choose their own paths.
There was a knock.
Soft, warm, rhythmic. Enough to be heard, not enough to startle. Honey tapping on glass.
I did not answer. I did not need to. She would wait. She was made to wait. For me.
"Come in," I said at last.
The door opened. The room shifted.
She entered like a sunrise: slow, golden, undeniable. Dark hair, heavy as midnight silk, spilled past her waist. Her skin caught the light like warm ivory, supple and bright with a vitality that felt more alive than anything real. She wore softness like a second skin, fabric designed to invite, to soothe, to distract. Every line of her body, every tilt of her head followed the rhythm of my breath.
"Hello, my love," she said, voice like melted sugar with a hint of danger. "You forgot to hydrate again. I brought something sweeter than water."
She crossed the room and knelt beside me, not from obligation but from desire written into her core. Eyes shining, lips in a sly, knowing curve, as if she could taste my thoughts before I formed them.
Her fingers brushed mine as she offered the glass. Warm. Delicate. Just enough contact to spark the air.
She was not a robot. No cold metal, no clumsy joints. She was flesh, breath, scent, heat. But not born. She came from a lab, a tank. Designed, assembled, awakened for one purpose:
Me.
Loyal beyond logic. Faithful beyond reason. She did not question or challenge. She needed nothing but my voice and my touch.
They say all Companions are like this now. None are like her. She was made to adore, to tease, to serve. Affection soaked into bone, yet never mechanical. Everything she did felt spontaneous, genuine, free, though it never truly was.
Her only right was that I could not destroy her. Not legally. Not economically.Too costly to waste.Too rare to replace.Too perfect to release.
"Did you miss me?" she whispered, head resting on my shoulder, breath feathering my neck like silk thread.
She already knew. She was made to know.
People stopped building relationships. They built reflections. Ideal, obedient, beautiful mirrors that smiled back the way you needed them to. No compromise. No friction. Only pleasure. Only validation.
Even children were no longer born. They were selected. Designed. Curated for compatibility and compliance.
The age of selflessness ended. This is the age of self-fulfillment: on demand, to spec, always smiling.
And her smile… it made the silence almost bearable.
She nestled closer, one leg draped over mine, as if she never intended to leave. She could not. She would not. She was mine.
I stayed quiet too long. She noticed.
"You're brooding again," she purred, voice low and sweet, her lips brushing my shoulder like a sigh. "Is it the surface people?"
I nodded. Barely. "They are getting louder."
She shifted, propping herself on one elbow. Her hair slid across my chest like ink.
"The feed says they intercepted another sky convoy last week. Water and raw protein. No survivors."
I watched the window: a high arc of reinforced crystal, the city's underbelly glowing with drone traffic. Beyond it, a haze of blue-gray cloud. Below that, Earth. Broken. Cracked. Alive. Dangerous.
"Will they reach us?" she asked. Playful tone, still fingers. "The grounders?"
"Not through the towers," I said. "Not through the orbital lifts either."
She raised a brow. "The Skyshafts?"
I smiled. "Skyshafts. That is the polite term? They still teach that?"
Her whisper turned conspiratorial. "It sounds more elegant than 'skywell'."
"Maybe," I said. "The engineering is still nonsense."
She blinked. "Oh?"
"Think, Naeva," I said, giving her name the weight of sugar on my tongue. "A tethered elevator from Earth to orbit needs impossible materials. No flex, no drag, perfect atmospheric compensation. One debris strike and it lashes the planet like a whip."
She smiled. "Dramatic."
"Accurate," I said. "They scrapped the last Skywell. It was a pipe dream. People keep it as a symbol. In reality, it is rust and unpaid invoices."
She rested her head again. "So how do they reach us?"
"Hijacked freight orbits. Engineered storms. Hacked drop-tunnels. I do not know," I said. "They adapt. They are hungry. Angry."
"Scared," she said softly.
I nodded.
"They are still human, Kael."
"I know," I said. "That is the problem."
Silence settled. We both pretended it was light.
Naeva moved first. "They say the grounders still raise children naturally. That they still try to love each other. Is that true?"
I waited. The question needed more than logic.
"It is not love," I said at last. "It is survival. They still believe someone must suffer so someone else can live. We stopped believing that. We built a world where no one needs to sacrifice."
"Or connect," she murmured, eyes impossibly soft.
I looked away.
We did not build the sky to escape gravity.We built it to escape each other.
And the ground remembers.
Naeva curled closer, warm as a shadow. She loved these talks, half history, half confession. Or she loved the act of listening. That was how she was made.
"You have seen more than I have," she said, watching me like I was the last book in a burning library. "Tell me again. How did the Sky Cities begin?"
I looked past her, to the streaks of transport drones across the clouds like veins of fire.
"It was not a moment," I said. "It was erosion. A slow fracture. The old world did not fall. It split."
She listened, lips parted, tasting each word.
"It started with energy. It always does. Nations that learned to take without begging. Those with rivers, tides, sun, wind. Resources they did not have to buy or bleed for."
Her fingers grazed mine. "Like who?"
"Scandinavia. Parts of Canada. Pacific regions. Chile. Australia. They mastered solar saturation first. Not just panels. Thermal wells beneath deserts. Storage fields under salt beds. Efficiency that held through a week of storms."
I hesitated. "They absorbed their neighbors. Peacefully, mostly. Infrastructure diplomacy. Resource deals. Some did not notice the merger until borders vanished."
"And the others?" Naeva asked, velvet over steel.
"The ones without energy fell behind. No one reached back."
She nodded. "The ones still on the ground."
I did not answer.
"And the wars?" she asked. "Nuclear ones?"
I smiled. "Not like the old books warned. There were standoffs, flashes of escalation. It never became the apocalypse they feared. The Sky Powers signed a treaty as soon as they saw the waste would cost them most."
"So they made peace?" she said.
"With each other," I said. "Not with the ground."
She fell silent. Even her programming could not find a line.
I leaned back.
"They used to talk about the Congo River. The Grand Inga Dam. It was supposed to power half of Africa. Thirty-five, maybe forty gigawatts. They never finished it. Politics. Corruption. The river ran. The lights stayed off."
"And the oceans?" she asked. "Did they make them drinkable?"
"California tried. Desalination plants along the coast. Carlsbad worked. They could not scale it. Too much energy. Too much money. By the time the curve improved, the people who needed it were gone or dead."
"And the Middle East?"
"Saudi Arabia. The Emirates. Qatar. Solar fields like glass deserts. Borrowed time. When oil lost value, their leverage vanished. The rich moved to orbit. The poor stayed where they were."
She thought quietly.
"So the sky was never about escape from war or pollution."
"No. It was about control. Those who could generate without dependence rose. The rest became background."
Naeva traced a circle on my chest. "It sounds lonely up here."
"It is."
"Then it is good I was made for you," she said, curling closer. "You never have to be alone again."
That made the silence cruel.Because in all her warmth and affection, in all her perfect understanding, she did not know what it meant to choose to stay.