The Sky Above, the Rivers Below, Ch 12: Drifting Apart

While empires rose and fell nightly within the servers of WorldWeaver, orchestrated by Imran's will, the quiet, persistent cough from his mother's room was a sound he found increasingly easy to ignore.

His days, and often his nights, were a never-ending cycle of coding, server improvements, AI behavior adjustments, and strategic planning sessions with Geta and his core team. WorldWeaver was more than a company; it was a living, breathing digital world that needed constant attention and care. The initial excitement had turned into a dedicated, even fanatical, user base. But with that success came the endless demand for new content, new worlds, new sensations. And then there was Chronic. Since the "Audit" and their later "meeting" about "User Well-being and Story Impact," Imran felt their subtle, bureaucratic watching like a constant, low-level hum under his operations. Every new story module had to be checked for "social and cultural alignment." Every new haptic feedback invention had to be assessed for "potential neurological problems." It was exhausting, a delicate dance of keeping the time-travel overlords happy while still pushing the limits of immersive experience.

There was simply no room, no mental energy left, for much else.

Friendships, the few he'd managed to make in the chaotic early years, had faded from neglect. He occasionally saw Min-ji Kim's name flash across his newsfeeds - a fiery opinion piece she'd written criticizing Chronic's latest "Temporal Harmony Initiative," or a notice for a university lecture she was giving on "The Selling of Nostalgia in Advanced Times."

Each time, he felt a strange pang. It was a mixture of old affection, a flicker of pride in her fierce intelligence, and a stronger surge of frustration. Her idealism, her constant focus on the perceived injustices of this world, felt… naive, almost deliberately argumentative.

"Doesn't she get it?" he'd think, dismissing the notification and turning back to a particularly tricky AI pathing problem in WorldWeaver's newest medieval fantasy world. "Always picking at flaws, always fighting. He was building worlds. Places to feel safe, powerful. Why did that have to be a fight?"

He hadn't spoken to her properly since that awkward meeting at the coffee shop months ago. He told himself they had simply grown apart, their paths naturally splitting as they navigated adulthood in this complex future. But a deeper, unacknowledged truth was that he actively avoided her now. He feared her clear, uncompromising gaze. He feared the judgment he was sure he'd see in her eyes if she truly knew how much of himself he poured into these "illusions," how little he had left for anything, or anyone, else.

Their shared past, their childhood bond made in the fires of displacement, felt distant now, like something he'd once known how to access but had lost the password to. WorldWeaver demanded all of him. It gave back a clean sense of control, of mastery. The code obeyed. The narratives resolved. It was a relief from the real world's messy emotions and difficult, unscripted problems.

His apartment, where silent panels slid open at his approach and the air was always a perfect temperature, was more a charging station than a home.

He ate, slept (when he remembered to), and occasionally entertained there. But his true life, his most vivid experiences, happened within the limitless, perfectly adjusted landscapes of his own creation. The real world, with its unpredictable factors and its demands for genuine, unscripted emotional connection, felt sluggish, its colors muted, like trying to navigate through syrup.

In his rare trips into what his mother still called "the real world," Imran sometimes tried to navigate personal relationships. He was, after all, a successful young entrepreneur, a minor celebrity in the tech and immersive entertainment fields. Opportunities for connection were not lacking. Yet, these meetings often felt as hollow and pre-programmed as a low-level computer character interaction in one of WorldWeaver's less advanced scenarios.

For the past few months, he'd been seeing Lyra. Not Lyra the cunning rogue from his favorite steam-powered WorldWeaver story, but Lyra Kim, a sleek, successful marketing executive for a bio-cosmetics firm native to this time.

She was Korean-American. Her family had migrated two generations and multiple time-adjustments ago, leaving them thoroughly and impressively assimilated. She was beautiful, intelligent, ambitious. She moved through the complex social levels of Neo-Kyoto with an effortless grace that Imran, for all his success, still found himself envying.

There was an undeniable, if perhaps shallow, attraction. Lyra represented, for Imran, a kind of idealized, "easy" mix of cultures. She had a connection to a Korean heritage - she could speak a few polite phrases, enjoyed the occasional "authentic" (though likely lab-grown and genetically optimized) Korean meal, and even attended the trendy, fusion-style "Neo-Joseon" cultural events that were popular among the assimilated rich. It was a heritage worn lightly, a collection of aesthetic choices. The complication, the lived reality, had been smoothed away generations ago. And that was precisely what he liked about it.

With Lyra, there were no difficult conversations about cultural loss, no passionate debates about Chronic's injustices, no uncomfortable digging up of painful pasts. She was entirely a creature of this advanced time, yet she carried a faint, pleasing echo of something older, something that connected with a part of Imran he usually kept carefully buried. Her appeal was in her design. She had all the right traits, without the challenging complexities.

Once, Imran had tried to broach this curiosity with her. Did she ever wonder if she was too perfect? "I mean, it seems like the scientists could have added a few flaws," he had joked, sipping a drink in the dim, elegant bar that was Lyra's favorite haunt. "Just for flavor."

Lyra had laughed, the sound clear and musical, her hair catching the lights with a pleasing glint. She'd placed a well-manicured hand over his and flashed him a brilliant smile.

"Oh, honey," she had said. "No scientist in their right mind would add imperfections. Who'd pay for them?"

Imran, caught off guard by her response, had laughed along with her.

Yet, he couldn't shake the feeling that she had not really understood his question.

Their dates were a carefully chosen series of Neo-Kyoto's finest experiences: zero-gravity cocktail lounges, private viewings at cutting-edge art installations, exclusive tables at restaurants where celebrity chefs made fantastical dishes from gene-edited ingredients. They spoke of market trends, of new tech releases, of the latest socialite scandals. It was pleasant. It was… smooth.

"She's… nice," Imran would think, as Lyra laughed, a perfectly controlled sound, at one of his witty comments about the absurdities of their hyper-advanced world. "Easy to be around. She understands this world, and she has a connection to something… older, something that feels… familiar in a comfortable way. It feels… safe."

A few weeks later, after a particularly pleasant evening together, Lyra had invited him to her place. She had led him into a spacious bedroom, with a floor-to-ceiling view of the neon lights of the city. With her dark hair spilling across the crisp white sheets, her smooth skin lit by the warm glow of the bedside lamps, she had looked almost otherworldly. Imran had paused, suddenly unsure, a faint flicker of discomfort growing in his stomach.

"Come here," she had said, reaching a hand towards him. "Come, it's all right."

He had stepped closer, and her hands had slid to the clasps of his shirt, deftly undoing each one.

"Imran, look at me," she had whispered. He'd obeyed, looking into her dark eyes.

"This is what we both want. It's why we're here, it's what you came for. I can give you what you need, sweetheart, you just have to let go."

Her words had echoed through him, and for a moment, he'd felt strangely adrift.

But then her hands were on him, and the sensation had sent a thrill through him, a surge of need that pushed all his doubts away.

When Lyra guided his hands to her top, lifting it up, revealing her smooth, unblemished skin, he did not resist.

She was right. This was why he was here.

"Just let go, Imran," she had murmured, her lips hot against his neck, her breath quickening. "I'll take care of you. I'll give you what you need."

He tried to let go. But he couldn't quite stop himself from wondering if this was all there would ever be. If this was the only kind of connection the real world had to offer him now.

Stripped of their clothes, they'd fallen together, skin pressed to skin, mouths tasting, exploring, searching. When Lyra's hand had slipped between his legs, finding his cock and guiding him inside her, Imran had felt a dizzying rush, the familiar sensation of the physical world fading away, replaced by the sharp, delicious rush of the pleasure center stimulators within the implants.

But as he entered her, him on top of her, Lyra still seemed perfect, blemish-less, more a concept than a person.

"It's okay," she had whispered, reading the hesitation on his face. "I want this, sweetheart. Let go."

So he did. He'd lost himself in her, the warmth of her body, the heat building inside him, the rush of the pleasure stimulators. She'd been so wet, so tight, and her hips had risen to meet his thrusts with a natural rhythm.

When he'd come, it had been a bright burst of bliss. For a brief moment, Imran had been able to let go, to let the pleasure center stimulators carry him beyond the confines of his own body, his own consciousness.

"It's okay," Lyra had said again. And, for a moment, it was.

But the feeling had faded. Soon, Imran had found himself lying there, his limbs heavy, his body pleasantly buzzing with the afterglow, the taste of Lyra still on his tongue, his head still spinning slightly from the pleasure stimulators, Lyra curled beside him, her fingers tracing gentle circles across his chest.

"I'm so glad we finally got here," she had said softly. "You were holding back before. But you can't do that, honey. It's okay to let yourself be who you are."

She had turned, her body moving smoothly, gracefully.

"You need someone like me, Imran. Someone who gets it, who understands what this is."

Imran had swallowed, the buzz fading, the doubts returning.

When he returned to his apartment, the silence of his home was a relief. He dove into WorldWeaver, booting up a random scenario and entering as a minor NPC character, a stable boy. The role fit him, he thought wryly. He could muck out the stables, move bales of hay, feed and groom the horses, and not worry about the larger questions of the narrative.

"Just let me be," he thought. "Please, let me just be."

***

The quiet, persistent cough from his mother's room, once an easily dismissed background noise in the soundtrack of Imran's life, was becoming harder to ignore. It was deeper now, a rattling sound that sometimes punctuated the pre-dawn silence when he was finally crawling into bed after an all-night coding session. Jamila was also thinner, her saris, once draped with a regal fullness, now seemed to hang a little looser on her frame. She moved more slowly, her energy, which had always seemed boundless even in the face of this bewildering future, now visibly diminished.

She rarely complained directly. When Imran, on his infrequent visits to their shared living space for a hastily consumed meal, would ask how she was, her answers were always variations on a theme: "I am well, beta, just a little tired today," or "Old bones, Imran, they creak a little louder in this strange climate."

She would wave away his suggestions for a full diagnostic at the Chronic Health Nexus, a place she deeply distrusted, preferring her own home remedies and the dubious "Ayurvedic Restorative" supplements she ordered from a niche temporal importer. The stress of their displacement over the years, her constant, unspoken anxieties about his path, the profound cultural isolation she felt despite her quiet friendships with Sook-ja and Margaret, and perhaps the long-term, subtle biological dissonances of living in a timeline so far removed from her own - all of it was taking a toll, a slow, insidious erosion.

Imran, immersed in the high-stakes, all-consuming world of WorldWeaver, registered these changes on a peripheral level, like a low-priority system alert he kept snoozing. He was in the midst of a massive server migration, a critical infrastructure upgrade essential for WorldWeaver's continued growth and its increasingly demanding VR capabilities. Simultaneously, Geta was pushing for a radical redesign of the core AI narrative engine, and Chronic's Department of Cultural Integration and Neurological Well-being was breathing down his neck with new "Ethical Immersion Guidelines" that threatened to hamstring his creative freedom.

"Ammi needs to take it easy, use the apartment's med-scanner more often," he'd tell himself, making a mental note to increase the automated delivery of nutrient-rich broths to her personal dispenser. "She's always been a worrier. She'll be fine. She just needs more rest. I'll arrange a full private consultation with a top Chronic specialist once this server migration is complete. I can't afford to get sidetracked right now, not with so much on the line." His solutions, when he thought of them at all, were technological, financial - an upgrade to her health monitoring subscription, a consult with a high-priced specialist he could easily afford.

The idea of simply being with her, of offering his time, his presence, his focused attention, felt like a luxury he couldn't afford, a demand on his overtaxed processing power that he unconsciously shied away from.

He buried himself deeper in the controllable complexities of his digital worlds. A cascade of red error flags scrolled past on his screen. He could fix those. He could trace the logic, find the break. A cough echoed from the other room, a broken sound with no clear source code. He leaned closer to the monitor, focusing on the fixable errors.

He'd call her sometimes, his image appearing on her wall screen, his voice slightly tinny from the comms. "Everything okay, Ammi?" he'd ask, already half-distracted by a cascade of system alerts on his secondary display.

"All is well, beta," she'd reply, her smile a little too bright, her eyes shadowed with a fatigue he chose not to see. "You work too hard. Remember to eat properly."

"You too, Ammi. I've scheduled an advanced nutrient delivery for you. Top quality." And then, "Sorry, gotta run. Critical server issue." Click. The connection severed, the duty call made, the gnawing anxiety momentarily assuaged by the illusion of responsible action. He was providing for her, wasn't he? Ensuring she had the best this timeline could offer. What more could a son do when he was also single-handedly managing a universe of infinite possibilities?

***

The call didn't come from his mother. It came from Sook-ja Kim. Her voice, usually so quiet and measured, was tight with an uncharacteristic urgency. "Imran-ssi," she said, the honorific sounding formal and strained, "you must come. Your mother… she has fallen. She is not… she is not responding well."

The air seemed to rush from Imran's lungs, a sudden, sharp pressure building behind his ribs that cut through the fog of code and deadlines.

He'd been in the middle of a critical WorldWeaver crisis meeting. Geta was passionately arguing for a complete rollback of a new haptic feedback protocol that was causing unexpected sensory overload in a small percentage of users. He mumbled a stunned apology. His mind struggled to switch tracks from virtual catastrophe to real-world emergency. He raced out of the office. The glittering, indifferent cityscape blurred past his automated transport's window.

He found Sook-ja and Margaret Shepard in his mother's small, perfectly tidy bedroom. Jamila lay on her mat, her eyes closed. Her face was a pale, waxy grey he'd never seen before. Her breathing was shallow, a faint, rattling sound that filled the otherwise silent room.

Sook-ja was bathing her forehead with a damp cloth. Her expression was etched with a deep, helpless sorrow. Margaret stood by the window, her back to the room, her shoulders rigid.

"Ammi?" Imran whispered, his voice cracking. He knelt beside her, reaching for her hand. It felt frail, like a bird's, and terrifyingly cold.

"She collapsed in the kitchen an hour ago," Sook-ja explained, her voice low and trembling. "We… we heard the thud from my apartment. The internal comms weren't responding. We used the emergency override for her door." Her eyes, usually so stoic, were filled with tears. "We called the Chronic Emergency Med-Response. They are… delayed. High call volume in this sector, they said."

Delayed. In this city of instant everything, where a gourmet meal could be made and delivered in minutes, emergency medical help was delayed.

He looked at his mother, truly looked at her, for what felt like the first time in years. The lines of worry he'd vaguely noticed were now deep canyons of pain and exhaustion. The silver in her hair seemed to have almost completely overtaken the black. The vibrant spark that had always defined her, even in this confusing future, was a dim, flickering ember. And he, her son, the one for whom she had sacrificed everything, had been too busy building empires of light and shadow to notice her fading away in the quiet reality of their shared apartment.

He felt his breath catch, the shame and guilt threatening to overwhelm him.

"I should have known," he whispered. "I should have… been here."

He remembered her gentle questions about his work, her pleas for him to rest, to connect, to remember. And he remembered his own impatience, his distractions, his easy dismissals. Each memory was a fresh stab of guilt, a searing condemnation of his huge, unforgivable neglect.

A choked sob caught in his throat. Right here. She was right here. The whole time. While he was mapping server loads. Adjusting spawn rates.

The Chronic med-techs finally arrived. Their manner was brisk, their equipment gleaming with impersonal efficiency. They stabilized Jamila. Their voices were a calm, professional murmur as they gave her stimulants and attached monitors. Their actions were a stark contrast to the whirlwind of guilt and fear raging within Imran.

As they prepared to move her to the Chronic Health Nexus, Imran stood by her bedside, holding her cold hand. The glittering, indifferent city outside was a mocking picture of his hollow success. WorldWeaver, his creation, his refuge, his triumph - the words had a flat, metallic taste.

***