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Eternal Sunset&nbsp;	The rain hasn't stopped since the machines took control. "Are you comfortable, Isabel?" Carl fussed over the pillows propping up his young wife's legs. Long stretches in bed always came with the ever-present threat of pressure sores. The heels, in particular were a high-risk area. They needed to float a bit off the mattress. Carl thought of everything; he always did. Draping a sheet over a wire frame surrounding Isabel's feet helped to keep the draft from chilling her feet. The crisp coastal air from their vantage point, a bay view window overlooking a private stretch of beach, came with the drawback of it always being a bit chilly. 	Not to worry, anything Carl might forget, Estelle would remember and provide. Isabel nodded in gratitude for her ever-devoted husband, then glanced up toward the fiberoptic brain recessed into the wall above her headboard. Estelle, the hub for the many life-saving pumps and monitors surrounding her sterile bed. “Thank you as well, Estelle. I’d be lost without you.”	Estelle answered Isabel with a disturbingly clear and human-sounding voice. “I’ll always be here for you, Isabel.” It was something she frequently promised, and near as Isabel could discern, she knew Estelle meant it. There was an incredible sweetness to her AI guardian. 	As sweet as Estelle could be, nothing quite matched the light in her husband’s eyes. Carl was thirty years her senior, and to Isabel, his pale blue eyes rivaled the morning sky over the bay. Each morning, as Carl would get up from the easy chair across the room, he would come to wake Isabel and check in with Estelle regarding vitals and any signs of disease progression. 	When their eyes met for the first time each day, Isabel would smile through her aches and speak her favorite endearment, a compliment about his eyes. “There’s my sunrise.”	This was their life, sweet moments punctuated by pain. When the world went mad months earlier, the backup generators went online, and the impenetrable security doors sealed the couple in. Neither of them could say what was left of the world around them. The heavy marine layer that rolled in on the day of the collapse soon turned to storm clouds, bringing heavy rain. Visibility was limited, giving the couple the growing sense that the entire world was reduced to what existed in this one room.	When Carl held his chest with a wince, a frighteningly regular occurrence these days, Isabel touched his wrist, her face etched with concern. “Estelle, is there nothing you can do for Carl? Surely there must be some way?”	A moment of silence passed as Estelle, equipped with advanced empathy modules, weighed her response with a mindfulness toward sparing her human counterpart’s feelings. She was connected to every part of Isabel, after all, and felt her pain along with the sick woman. Even the emotional pain. “I am genuinely sorry, Isabel. But my nanobot’s makeup is attuned to your unique physiology.” 	It was the most unthinkable tragedy: This was supposed to be the generation where no one ever had to die again. Yet here she was, being kept alive against all odds, while her beloved, aging husband struggled with heart disease. If no help came from outside soon, and for all they knew it was likely not to, Carl was going to die. In his chair. Directly across from Isabel’s bed. Where she would never be able to escape seeing him.	“Isabel, love. Help will come. They have to come eventually. This place stands out like a sore thumb. They’ll come for food, water, other supplies…” He paused to rub the space between his left shoulder and pectoral again, his left eye squinting as he thought on the frequency of the chest pains. “It isn’t as bad as it seems, love. I’ll lie down for a bit, I’m always fine after.”	Carl kissed Isabel and left Estelle in charge, heading back to his recliner. He soon dozed off, breathing evenly, occasionally murmuring in his sleep, a habit Isabel found endearing. She took a deep, steadying breath as she felt a cool wave of benevolent nanobots coursing through her body, attempting to soothe her during her rising panic over Carl’s worsening health. She was never allowed to feel anything too extreme. The host must always be preserved. Estelle’s directives were rigid.	Isabel could not even panic. Estelle soothed her. If Isabel cried, nanobots deployed to her brain to dispense the proper chemicals to lift her mood. Too excited, pressure mounting in her heart? Muscle relaxers softened her myocardium. The cancer in her blood, always poised on the hill and waiting for the call to charge, forever held at bay by infinite nanobot sentinels prepared to defend Isabel’s organs.	From time to time, Isabel would plead with Estelle to figure out some way to pass her services on to carl, even for a short time. It was no use; Estelle would remind her. Each system was paired with a specific human host. If only Carl’s unit had made the delivery deadline before the collapse. It certainly wasn’t doing him any good sitting on a loading dock in Japan where the manufacturer was located.	Thoughts of Carl’s missing medical unit snapped Isabel’s gaze back to the recliner, where a very still Carl looked at her with quiet eyes, having woken up again as though sensing her distress.	He gazed lovingly at Isabel, those pale blue eyes warming her as they always did. When they slid slowly shut then, she knew it was for the last time. 	Looking back at that day a hundred years before, the empty sockets of Carl’s skull gazing back at her, she could still see those pale blues, the last sunset of her life. Estelle, whirring softly above her, did what she had always done; kept Isabel from feeling too sad, from getting too excited. Her directives were rigid.	The host must be preserved.	The End

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Eternal Sunset

ShienOShea

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Eternal Sunset

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