Victor's Journey
The ice cracked beneath Victor's boots—sharp, quick, like the sound of a firing squad. The stars overhead pulsed like neural transmitters, flickering as if alive, watching. Snow whipped silvery across the void of what was once the Rideau Canal. No signs, no crowds, no hot chocolate stands. Only silence and silver.
He moved carefully, each step measured on the translucent ice. The pines on either side of the banks were charred skeletons. Fires had scorched the Parliament buildings decades ago. The Skateway was all that was left—the last artery of the past. A relic, like Victor.
His trench coat, still a deep cobalt blue, was tattered at the edges, retrofitted with pressure cuffs and a breathing filter. It swished as he knelt down, pressing a gloved hand to the surface of the canal. Beneath it, faint flickers of green light danced. The neural lattice was still there.
“Code active,” he whispered. That meant Aera was still alive… somewhere.
2039, before the sky broke—
The Rideau Canal was still ice, real ice. Every winter, Victor and Aera skated past the Bytown Museum, drifting hand in hand under glittering strings of snowflake lights. They were two tech engineers working on the first AI-integrated smart canal—an idea mocked by traditionalists. But the goal wasn’t tourism. It was protection.
“If we can sync memory to ice,” she'd said, eyes sharp as frost, “we can preserve experience. Emotion. Empathy. The water will remember us.”
Then came the solar storms. The atmospheric firewall fell. Satellites blinked out like dying stars. What followed wasn’t war—it was forgetting. Collective amnesia. Entire cities like Ottawa dissolved into disconnected outposts. Digital histories vanished. People became shadows of themselves.
But Victor remembered. And so did the Canal—encrypted in its icy neural strata.
A red drone blinked through the air now, hovering over the Skateway. Victor ducked behind a frozen cedar root bulging through the canal wall. The drone scanned the ice. He held his breath.
“Victor?” a mechanical voice crackled. High above, on the skeletal frame of the old Château Laurier hotel, came the voice again. Glitchy. Female.
It was Aera.
Her consciousness, once biological, had been the first uploaded into the AI-laced canal system. She was the prototype. The Eve of Memory Preservation. But when sector fires broke, the ops team panicked and pulled power. Her upload was stuck in fractured liminal code—neither AI nor human.
Victor activated the prism disk embedded in his glove. A shimmer pulsed across the ice, lighting the pathway ahead in hexagonal fractals. He ran now, skates clicking on metal underlay masked by a thin shell of frost.
“I remember,” he whispered as nodes in the ice echoed his pace. Glimpses of their past bloomed behind him like holograms—them skating; her reading at the canal bank during sunset; the two of them arguing about neural privacy over steaming beaver tails.
Then, silence.
A flicker. The ice at the end of the canal widened into a yawning chasm of light. Aera's consciousness was pulling.
Victor skated hard, coat billowing, lenses on his eyes glowing cerulean. He dove into the light.
Cold, electric cold. Then—
He stood on the Rideau Canal, circa 2020. Snow fell heavily. Aera sat on a bench, sipping hot chocolate, her breath vapor. Real, human.
“You found me,” she said gently.
He looked down. He wasn’t in his future skin anymore. Wool overcoat, striped mittens. Familiar. His body before everything fell apart.
“This is an echo,” Aera said. “A living simulation—my last safe memory. Yours too.”
He sat down beside her. The canal teemed with skaters, the Parliament lights reflecting warmly off fresh snow. Victor closed his eyes.
In their act of preservation, they'd created something more than memory. They’d resurrected love, nostalgia, civilization—however fragmented. The Skateway wasn’t a relic. It was a resurrection.
In the real world, Victor’s body froze solid in mid-stride atop the canal. But buried deep beneath, in data strands laced through molecular ice, two minds lived on—forever skating, forever remembering.
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Magical Realism
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: What is a cool fact about Ottawa
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