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of virtual interface and selected an option. Another door opened to Rigel’s left immediately. It was clearly labeled, “Singles Dating.”
    Misha grabbed Rigel’s hand. She dragged him into the new room.
    There was a brief blur as they crossed, the shimmer of reality changing.
    Rigel felt a jolt.
    I see you.
    Darkness.
    Rigel lost Misha. He was suddenly nowhere. His avatar was gone.
    Welcome, Rigel.
    He tried to move but couldn’t. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel a thing. There was only the voice. It was huge, reverberating and awe-inspiring as if to encompass all reality within itself. Rigel wanted to cower from it. The voice felt as if it were too big to comprehend.
    I see your sadness. I sense your despair.
    Rigel wanted to make himself small, invisible, but there was no hiding from the voice. It reached easily into the core of Rigel’s being.
    I can see….
    Reality shifted. Rigel was suddenly standing in the desert, the merciless midday sun burning in the sky. Heat rose from the barren dust-covered landscape in waves, and the air shimmered, stifling him. He looked around. Aurora was a small cluster of skyscrapers dozens of kilometers away. He was out in the wastelands beyond the city. Rigel had only been outside the walls once, when he’d had to identify his parents’ bodies after the crash.
    The faintest of sounds up in the sky.
    Rigel looked, searching in the cloudless blue, and found it. An airship, gleaming white as it approached on the gentle wind.
    It was far away, but even from this distance, one could tell that the ship was on fire.
    “No,” Rigel whispered. He backed away, but the airship was coming in too fast.
    He knew that ship. Recognized it from the police reports and the drone surveillance video he had watched.
    It was the White Hammer . And this was the crash that had taken the lives of both of Rigel’s parents.
    The flames blossomed on the body of the airship like a deadly parasitic flower that consumed everything around it. The ship tilted, then started weaving frantically as the pilot tried to come in for a hard landing. The ship was headed right for where Rigel was standing, but he was too horrified to try to move away. He imagined he could hear the screams of the people inside that ship, the dozens of passengers about to die in that accident.
    The White Hammer fell from the sky in a blur of smoke and flame. Eight tons of steel crumpled like a flimsy tin can when the ship slammed onto the ground with enough force to create a small crater beneath it. Dust exploded outward trailing the edge of the shock wave, and when it reached Rigel, it knocked him down with sudden violent force. He choked on the dust. Rigel tried to stand up, coughing, but then the ship exploded, and the fireball raced out in every direction.
    He cried out. Blazing heat enveloped him….
    And then suddenly it was gone. Reality blurred again, and now Rigel could see at least twenty vehicles surrounding the crash site. Emergency lights were flashing. People were talking, many were crying. Corpses were laid out in rows covered by bright orange plastic.
    A police car approached. Stopped. The officer opened the back door, and Rigel saw himself coming out of the car.
    Rigel shut his eyes. He remembered this part very well. He did not want to see.
    But he could not help it. He opened his eyes again and approached his memory-self with horrified fascination. It was a perfect reconstruction of that day, except that now he was looking at himself from outside.
    He heard the officer telling him that no survivors had been found. He heard his other self answer, numb. He had not cried then, and he still hadn’t cried. He had been seventeen at the time. Two years ago, almost exactly.
    Rigel followed himself down the rows of covered corpses until one of the rescue crew saw him and directed him to two in particular.
    He peeled open the first body bag. His father’s face looked like a melted parody of himself. The mouth was open,