The world is comprised of noise, sounds that scratched at the inside of my head. The rhythmic beep and ping of mechanical vampires pumping numbing venom into my veins through burning needles. The uneven hiss of oxygen gushing in my nostrils. The quiet rustle of bleached cotton sheets over dry skin. Slowly flaking away like the rest of me, preparing to shed my human skin.

He enters then, his diminishing resolve clear in his eyes. The pain eating me alive pales in comparison to what I see in his gaze. My brilliant, brilliant love, why can't you see it's better to let me go? Instead, the scrape of metal on linoleum marks the start of another vigilant night, and another torturous session as I watch him suffer my death.

His fingers weave through mine. This is new. Nathan hasn't touched me in weeks, as if physical contact will cause me to evaporate like morning mist.

His lips brush the brittle skin on the back of my hand, a spark of warmth that jolts of my arm, forcing me to focus on the words spilling from his lips, caught in the fog of morphine.

"I've done it Jo, I found the code."

I tried to speak, the words stuck fast in a throat half rotted inside. He brushes the wispy strands of hair still clinging to my skull out of my eyes.

"Tonight, I'm taking you out of here."

The fire in his eyes scares me. I can feel the heat of it reaching forth, the flames licking over my body. Understanding slams into me, causing me to choke on my breath with a rasping cough. Nathan reaches for a cup on the night stand, fishing a chip of ice he carefully rubs across my chapped lips.

"Just a bit longer, Jo, just a bit longer."

I don't have the strength to stay awake for him. Consciousness is a fleeting creature, here one more, startled away the next. My hours spent awake have trickled away over the weeks. The doctors told me I don't have long now. I realize how close I am when I wake briefly in Nathan's arms. The numerous sounds of my hospital room are gone, boiling down to the sound of his breath and heartbeat where my head rests against his chest. It is the sound that fills my world as he carries me through the empty corridors of the hospital. Where are the night staff? Wouldn't someone stop him?

We pass the front desk where the night nurse gives a subtle nod, buzzing us from the building. Ah, Nathan what have you done?

For the time in weeks, I smell the fresh night air, tinged by recent rainfall, cool and damp against my skin. Nathan carries me to our car, carefully buckling me in.

I can barely breathe, my lungs struggling to take in air in great wheezing gasps. I wonder if this is what drowning feels like. Nathan shoots me a worried glance as he drives out of the hospital parking lot, a war of determination and regret in the set of his jaw.

"Hang on for me, Jo, a little while longer."

When consciousness slips away like a bird in flight, I think I've failed him but I wake again in the familiar confines of his lab. There is a sharp pinch at my temples. I can feel the intrusion of the metal piercing my temples, but can't reach up the hand to feel it. It feels like an ice pick jammed into my brain.

"Sorry, sweetheart, those are necessary for the procedure." Nathan is looking desperation, more than anything I want to wrap my arms around him and tell him everything is going to be okay.

"Please, please work," he whispers as his free hand reaches out, hitting a key on his laptop.

The pain vanishes.

For a moment I hear Nathan sob, a soft broken cry before nothing. The absence of noise has its own sound, a muted scream you can't hear so much as feel. I would say it is something you can feel in your bones but I can't feel those either. You don't realize how in tune you are to the subtle sensations of the inner workings of your body until they vanish. I can't feel my pulse, my breath, or the tingle of sleeping nerves. Nothing.

If this is oblivion, why am I aware of it?

I am aware, I know that I am somewhere, that I exist. My senses don't work anymore, forcing me to find new ones, and the adjustment is a slow torturous process as I hover between a state of being and not being.

Eventually I 'see' what's around me but I don't understand it, not at first, the beautiful impossibility of it.

The glowing scroll of ones and zeros, surrounding me, running through me, occupying the same space of my non existent existence. I wonder if that is what I am, a cluster of ones and zeros, a knot of confused code. I reach for my memories, wondering what I will find of myself.

Johanna Dawson, age thirty two, married to the love of my life.

It filters back in bits and pieces. Waking up to sunshine through robin's egg curtains, the clouds my father painted on the walls of my blue room. Laughing as I chased the other kids around the playground, my turn as 'it.' Tagging Bobby Saunders hard enough so both of us fall to the ground. My first kiss, a pale awkward moment compared to the fireworks of Nathan's first explanation of my lips. The sheer peacock green prom dress with the beaded waistline that made my date blush. My first sexual experience in the dorm room of a boy I thought I would love forever, the champagne tingle in my veins as his fingers stroked the right chords of my being. Nathan, my handsome Nathan, from the first sight of him across the room at a conference, to our first date. Nathan, who liked to dance with me to slow jazz in our living room. He brought home bouquets of wild flowers he picked himself off the side of the road and made the best french toast I ever tasted. He would bring me iced tea as I worked for hours in my garden, hands stained by the earth, dirt under my fingernails. On our wedding day he stared into my eyes and cried with me as we took our vows. He stared in my eyes and cried again on the day I told him I was sick.

When I told him I was dying.

"I'll find a way to save you." It was a beautiful sentiment, even if it was a fanciful one. I held him in my arms, giving him as much comfort as his hold gave me.

"Death and taxes, darling," I sighed, rubbing my lips along his neck.

He shook his head, holding me tighter. "I'm working on something. I make it work in time."

I didn't believe him, not really. I believed in him, but I couldn't permit myself so dangerous a feeling as hope.

Synaptic energy transference, like some jargon straight out of a science fiction story. Nathan often spouted how similar the human brain was to a computer, all one had to do was figure out the code, the possibilities of the human mind. He spout an endless stream of facts and discoveries until he noticed the glazed look in my eyes and broke off with a laugh. I may not have been able to follow his words but they only confirmed what a brilliant mind he possessed. I was so proud of him and the importance of his work but through the entire descent of my sickness, I couldn't bear to dream he'd succeed.

Yet here I was. Proof.

Where was he?

I searched for him, unable to gauge the flow of time, trying to feel out my surroundings with unfamiliar senses. Seconds could have passed or centuries. My love could have turned to dust while I tried to make sense of my new world. I couldn't bear the thought. I could feel like this, lacking form but capable of emotion. As my awareness fine tuned itself and spread, I wondered if I could manipulate the flow of zeros and ones around me. I could understand it now, parts of it, flashes of clarity before the numbers blurred into each other.

Perhaps he couldn't find me because I had no presence, no physical form for him to see. He was still limited to his five living senses while I floated on an entirely different plane of existence.

Eventually I worked up the courage to reach for the stream of numbers, shaping it with phantom fingers like incorporeal clay. I shaped myself from mirror memory, generous with the reflection of myself. I sought for the self I was before sickness withered my body away. My 'body' blurred at the edges, I was a true ghost in the machine, a digital phantom formed from bits of data. The first body was a test run, only sustainable for a moment, long enough for my mouth to call out Nathan's name.

It rippled through the ones and zeros, fading away.

There was no answer.

I kept trying, pulling a body together from errant pieces of code until finally, I scrounged enough to maintain a permanent form. It was an odd form, more fluid and changeable than a human body, but it was mine. I curled into myself, staring out through the unending swirl of code, waiting for my love to find me again.

Maybe he couldn't.

A form made emotion sharper, felt through the whole of my being. I could imagine loneliness like an unheard heartbeat, searching for its accompanying rhythm. The space around me is vast, unending, bigger than the known world. How do you find a speck floating on the ocean?

Even if Nathan manages to find me, what then? Where would we exist? What would be do? Perhaps he would know what to do, having spent a lifetime manipulating digital code to do his bidding, writing programs and algorithms, unlocking the secrets of the cyber universe.

I was a elementary school art teacher by day. Outside the world of glitter, cotton balls, and glue guns, I pained landscapes and gardened, up to my elbows in earth. I knit the occasional hideous sweater and over long scarf. I read cozy mysteries and historical romances, with a fetish for highlanders.

My computer skills were limited to facebook games and a half hearted intermittent blog. Why did Nathan think I could survive here?

A pity party did me little good. I managed to give myself form despite a lack of experience and knowledge. Perhaps I could do more if I stopped thinking so hard. Adapting to this existence created a new cycle of instinct. I could sense broken pieces of useless data, filler that was lost, floating aimless in the stream.

I began to pluck them out like weeds, piling them around me until I thought I had enough to begin. At first I tried to sculpt them with an artist's temperament but the code would slip between my fingers, worse than sand with the consistency of spider webs. It required a different approach. Instead of forcing the bits of code together, I began to weave them like a skein of yarn, mentally projecting the end product I sought. After several false starts, I stared at the pointed petals of my creation. It wasn't perfect but the color was there. Somehow it came out to a perfect sky blue, like my bedroom walls from long ago. If I could make one, I could make more, plant little beacons and flags for Nathan to find me.

Someday he would find me.

The passage of time is still impossible to gauge, too fluid and unchanging for any sense of time. I kept weaving and planting, surrounding myself with fluted blossoms in midnight blues, bright yellow trumpets like splashes of sunshine, intricately layered roses in blushing pink hues. A piece at a time, I built a garden, laying the path for Nathan. Waiting for him to show. It felt like forever. It felt like a blink.

I kept expanding the garden, building trellises and columns and coded statuettes to keep myself from dwelling on the same question over and over.

Nathan, my love, where are you?

Perhaps he'd moved on with his life, parting with this final gift. More likely, perhaps he was unaware of his success and gave up. I kept calling his name into the silent stream of code, hoping somehow he heard it or saw it. I can't think the worst thoughts, the idea of him mourning my loss, unable to cope, slowly fading into the twilight of his life until his brightness was snuffed out. I would be left here, alone, forever.

I would rather have died in the hospital bed.

The garden continued to expand, a beautiful wild thing created from thought and memory, part dream, part wish. The colors were brighter, but the blooms were the same, ones I wished I had in my garden alongside the familiar, until it became both beacon and sanctuary. I created dirt for the feel of it, and sky so I could imagine the warmth of the sun I once knew. It was a grand facsimile of the life I had, of a place I felt great pleasure and safety, but there was Nathan.

It was growing harder to remember him. His features began to fuzz in my memories. I clung to the snapshots, of his arms around me as we waltzed around the living room, the shape of his smile. His lips brushing mine, teasing a fire in my belly. His absence held a knife's sharpness, one I had to push away so I could continue to exist, to build our garden. I always thought of it as ours though it was missing its most important piece.

Hope is a fickle emotion. It can sustain you, keep you holding on far longer than you believe you could, but when it began to fade, it drained you. I felt it ebb away slowly at first, until I realized I continued to build the garden from habit more than a sense of purpose. Shaping petals became a necessary distraction.

I don't know what changed. What blip in the code gave it away. My hands stilled on the half finished rose as I looked up, watching him walk down the carefully constructed path of polished stone. He was unsteady on his feet, his features more haggard and worn than I remembered them, hinting at the passage of time between us. His looked everywhere and nowhere, observing his surroundings with senses far more tuned than mine. I could feel the smile on my newly shaped lips at the thought. His body was new but he was already masterful in his control. I would expect no less from my brilliant husband.

He paused at the sight of me, eyes filled with tears that were only real to us, the same love shining from them, through them, all around him. He'd found me at last.

"What took you so long?"