The hospice room smelled of lilacs and saline, a specific alchemy of antiseptic and the artificial floral scent used to mask the inevitable organic undertones of dying. Sophia Thorne lay propped against pillows that had been fluffed and refluffed by Ethan's anxious hands, her body a topography of diminishment—sharpened clavicles, translucent skin revealing the blue cartography of veins, hair white and fine as spider silk against the cotton case.
She was ninety-four years old.
The Specificity Foundation had become a global institution by then, a network of monasteries and schools dedicated to the preservation of the analog, the local, the un-digitized. Its founder was now merely a body, and the body was failing, cell by specific cell.
