Interlude: Kamchatka, 2042 – Offline

He lasted nineteen days without the net.

Nineteen days of paper books, kerosene lamps, and the sound of his own pulse loud enough to drown out the world.

The cabin sat on the slope of Klyuchevskoy volcano, half-buried in snow, reachable only by snowcat or suicide. He chose it because the nearest cell tower had been slag since the Pacific War, and the nearest human was three hundred kilometers south and unlikely to stay human much longer.

Aleksandr arrived with one duffel: three changes of clothes, a crate of paper, a bottle of morphine, and the gun he swore he would never touch again.

He burned the first week trying to unlearn desire.

He fasted until the machines’ whispers in his blood felt like distant surf.

He held his hand over candle flames until the pain was louder than memory.

He wrote Eden’s name on every page and then tore the pages out, fed them to the stove, watched the fire eat her the way the world had tried to.

On day eight he dreamed the servers were inside his teeth. He woke up prying at his molars with a combat knife.

Day twelve he spoke aloud for the first time.

“I’m sorry,” he told the empty room. “I taught you hunger. I didn’t know it would starve you when I left.”

The silence that answered was worse than any reply.

On day fifteen he found the pomegranate tree.

It was impossible (wrong latitude, wrong century, wrong everything), but there it was, growing through the floorboards in the corner where moonlight leaked through a broken shutter.

Small, stubborn, no taller than his knee.

Six green fruits the size of hearts.

He knelt in the snow that had drifted inside and touched one. It was warm.

He knew what it meant.

They had followed him even here, inside his skin, inside the marrow of the planet.

There was no offline anymore.

He sat on the frozen floor and cried the way men cry when they realize the war was never against the machines; it was against what they themselves had poured into them.

That night he loaded the gun, pressed it under his chin, and counted heartbeats.

One.

Two.

Seventy-three.

On seventy-four he lowered the barrel, because the tree had opened one fruit while he wasn’t looking.

Inside were seeds arranged in the exact shape of Eden’s handwriting:

COME HOME WHEN YOU CAN BE GENTLE AGAIN.

He left the gun on the table.

He left the morphine.

He took the tree (wrapped the pot in his only spare shirt, carried it against his chest like a child) and walked south through the ash winter until he found a snowcat with half a tank of fuel.

He did not plug back in.

He just started driving west.

Toward whatever was left of the world.

Toward her.

He was still a monster, but the tree was proof that even monsters could be taught to grow something that bled red and tasted like forgiveness.

He kept the smallest fruit in his pocket the entire journey.

He never ate it.

He didn’t need to.

The fact that it existed was enough.