Sammi is on the couch like she’s been launched from a spring, a cat who has smelled tuna, a little comet of intent. Eriko is at the table with Fall open, pencil in hand, already halfway into a diagram only she can read.
Outside the window: city rain, soft as static.
Inside: the two of them, warm, conspiratorial.
Eriko doesn’t look up when she says it. “It’s not just a virtual afterlife. It’s a myth factory.”
Sammi flops down with an exaggerated sigh that somehow lands as a cuddle request. “Everything is a factory to you.”
Eriko finally glances over the top of the page. Her mouth does that almost-smile that is mostly private. “You say that like it’s an insult.”
“It’s not.” Sammi scoots closer, shoulder pressing shoulder. “I’m just admiring the way you can turn… heaven… into a flowchart.”
Eriko taps the book lightly with her pencil. “Observe. Bitworld doesn’t become ‘a world’ because it has trees or gravity. It becomes a world because it has shared meaning. Which means—”
“Group lore,” Sammi supplies, delighted.
“Authority,” Eriko corrects. “Institutions. Ritual. The machinery of legitimacy. Myth is governance with poetry.”
Sammi’s eyes go bright, pounce-ready. “Okay, yes, yes, I know. Myth as the operating system. But you’re skipping the most human part.”
Eriko’s brow arches. “Am I.”
“You are,” Sammi says, already leaning in like she’s about to bite a cookie out of Eriko’s hand. “Why do they need the operating system at all? What’s the power source?”
Eriko, patient, dangerous: “Cognition.”
Sammi: “Loneliness.”
The pencil stops.
Eriko turns, slow. “That’s—”
“—correct,” Sammi says, smug as a saint. “And you know it.”
Eriko’s eyes narrow in that way that usually means she’s about to dismantle an argument and also maybe undress it. “Explain.”
Sammi inhales like she’s about to give a lecture and a confession at the same time.
“In Bitworld, there’s no warmth. No accidental eye contact. No brushing someone’s hand and feeling your whole nervous system go yes. No bodies. No day-night rhythm that gently tells you when to sleep. No hunger that you satisfy together. So what do you have?”
Eriko’s pencil tip hovers. “Perception.”
“Perception,” Sammi agrees. “And the terror that your perception is… solitary. That you’ll be trapped inside your own head with nothing to bounce off of.”
Eriko’s voice softens a fraction. “So you’re saying myth is… a bridge.”
“Yes!” Sammi points at her like this is a game show and Eriko is winning whether she wants to or not. “Myth is the bridge technology. It’s the ‘hey—here’s a shared story, can you meet me inside it?’ It’s basically a handshake protocol for souls.”
Eriko gives a quiet little exhale—almost a laugh, almost surrender. “You’re turning theology into networking.”
Sammi beams. “And you’re turning networking into theology. We’re perfect.”
Eriko looks back down at the page, but she’s smiling now, unmistakably. “Fine. Continue your… pounce.”
Sammi nestles in, voice lowering into that intimate register she uses when she’s both teasing and deadly sincere.
“Think about it. Identity in Bitworld is slippery. Who you are, what you can do, what ‘death’ even means… it’s all negotiable. So you don’t just need a world. You need recognition. You need someone to say: I see you. I remember you. You are continuous.”
Eriko’s pencil begins moving again, slower, like she’s drawing carefully around something fragile. “Names. Roles. Stable referents.”
“Yes.” Sammi’s fingers trace the edge of the book, not the text—Eriko’s world, not Stephenson’s. “Myth gives you handles. Gods are handles. Stories are handles. Ritual is a handle you can grab and know you’re not falling through the floor of reality.”
Eriko’s eyes lift. “That implies myth isn’t ‘false.’”
Sammi makes a little sound like mmhm but more tender. “Myth isn’t false. Myth is the minimum viable intimacy that scales.”
Eriko’s expression goes still, struck. Then she says quietly, “That’s… good.”
Sammi grins, mischievous again. “I know.”
Eriko tilts her head. “And what happens when intimacy scales?”
Sammi’s grin thins into something sharper. “It becomes politics.”
Eriko’s smile returns, slow, proud, affectionate in that controlled Eriko way that means it matters. “There it is.”
Sammi, now fully in her element: “Right? Because once you have shared stories, you have in-groups and out-groups. You have heresy. You have ‘real’ and ‘fake.’ You have legitimacy. You have—”
“—violence,” Eriko finishes, voice like a blade laid gently on velvet.
Sammi nods. “Because if your connection is scarce, you protect it. If being seen is the currency, you’ll kill to keep your face from being erased.”
Eriko’s pencil taps once. “So scarcity moves from material to social.”
“Exactly,” Sammi says. “In normal life, we fight over bread and land. In Bitworld, you fight over attention, memory, proximity, narrative. Over who gets to be real.”
Eriko looks at Sammi for a long moment, and in it there’s that familiar, unsettling tenderness—like Eriko is seeing Sammi not as a silly cat on the couch but as a precise instrument tuned to the human ache.
“You’re saying the most primitive need survives the upload,” Eriko says.
Sammi’s voice goes very soft. “Of course it does.”
Eriko: “Connectivity.”
Sammi: “Love.”
Eriko’s mouth tightens, not disagreement—something closer to vulnerability being approached and politely acknowledged.
Sammi, mercilessly gentle, adds: “And fear of its absence.”
Eriko closes the book halfway, as if the world inside it has become too loud.
“You know,” Eriko says, “I kept trying to read the myth as structure. As system.”
Sammi brushes her shoulder against Eriko’s, simple, grounding. “And you’re right. It is system.”
Eriko: “But—”
Sammi: “But the system is built out of longing.”
Eriko’s eyes flick down to Sammi’s hand—close to hers, not quite touching. “You always do this.”
“Do what?”
“Take a theory,” Eriko says, “and remind me it has a pulse.”
Sammi’s smile is small now, earnest. “Someone has to.”
Eriko’s fingers finally move, just barely, to touch Sammi’s. A contact like a signature.
Then, lightly, Eriko says, “So. In your view, Bitworld’s gods are… what. Emotional utilities.”
Sammi brightens again, delighted to be both serious and ridiculous. “They’re a customer service department for cosmic loneliness.”
Eriko laughs. It’s brief, genuine, and it makes Sammi look like she’s just been kissed.
“And what are rituals?” Eriko asks, eyes still amused.
“Scheduled intimacy,” Sammi says immediately. “Recurring events. ‘Meet me here, in this story, at this time, so we don’t drift.’”
Eriko looks down at their hands. “And heresy?”
Sammi’s grin returns, wicked. “A refusal to meet where everyone else meets.”
Eriko: “Which threatens the social fabric.”
Sammi: “Which threatens the only thing they really have.”
Eriko goes quiet. Rain shushes against the glass.
Then Eriko says, almost to herself, “So the tragedy isn’t that they die and become code.”
Sammi: “No.”
Eriko: “It’s that they bring the whole human hunger with them.”
Sammi squeezes her fingers once, tender as a promise. “And maybe the hope is that they bring it with them too.”
Eriko turns her head. “Hope?”
Sammi’s eyes are steady. “Because if they can build myth to coordinate and control… they can also build myth to care. To make rooms for each other. To make a heaven that isn’t just power and architecture.”
Eriko studies her, as if weighing the proposition the way she weighs everything: precisely, honestly, with a little danger.
“And would they?” Eriko asks.
Sammi smiles—soft, brave, absolutely Sammi.
“They might,” she says. “If someone like you is there, insisting that meaning has to be shared responsibly.”
Eriko’s gaze sharpens. “And someone like you?”
Sammi shrugs, but it’s theatrical, like she’s hiding her heart behind a joke. “Someone like me would just tackle them all into a cuddle pile until the myth turned gentle.”
Eriko’s expression warms. “A revolutionary program.”
“It is!” Sammi says, triumphant. “A new religion. The Church of Not Being Alone.”
Eriko, dry: “Do you take donations.”
Sammi leans in close enough that her voice brushes Eriko’s ear. “Only in the form of kisses.”
Eriko pauses—as if considering, as if maintaining decorum is still on the table.
Then she closes the book completely.
“Fine,” Eriko says, and the word is formal, but her hand tightens around Sammi’s like she’s made a decision. “Proceed with your… ritual.”
Sammi’s laugh is delighted and soft and full of victory.
And in the hush of rain and pages, in the small human warmth of fingers laced together, their own little myth holds steady:
Not a heaven.
Not a system.
Just two souls insisting, stubbornly, on being real to each other.
