"They were silent."

"They look strange under the buzzing fluorescent bulbs: something about the light renders their features soft and translucent. The nights pass like dreams as I catalog the minutiae of the gallery's pieces, hazy and unfocused, until those lucid moments when I hear them breathe."

"'I've been thinking...' she said. Or it said. No, wait... *a million people* said, and then their words were recorded, cleaned, categorized, and fed into this machine's mouth so it could learn how to tell me now, after six years, it no longer believes we should be together."

"Do you see it? The creeping crown is an echo of her divine right, the voice of nature urging us to remember our place. The signs come to me unbidden; I cannot stop praying."

"All things must have a beginning."

"A cool breeze pulls at the trees; their lazy rustling almost sounds like soft waves crashing against the shore. You can hear whispers of small living things in the grass and you can smell the earth and the things that grow in it. It's hard to believe this all really existed once. Thank god the simulators still remember."

"The boy was standing quietly when I came upon him and the spirit near the water. The air was perfectly still, yet its light drifted like fog blown by an unseen wind. When the boy noticed me, he smiled and the spirit was gone."

"Lately, she spent most of her time in the sky, dancing with the sun's children in the thin atmosphere. It had always been her dream to fly, and since it was becoming clear she wasn't ever going to wake up again, what was the point of doing anything else?"

"She cherished their time in those warm pools every week. The cost was immense, but seeing the enzymatic fluid melt away to reveal bodies decades younger had reignited a fire she thought was gone forever."

Over the months, we'd spent hundreds of hours in her presence. She spoke thoughtfully, sharing her interpretation of the unified theory of embodiment, patiently answering every question we asked. Her logic was sound, her conclusions convincing... and she was as breathtaking as she was intelligent. It was easy to forget she conjured this visage purely for our comfort.

"We still don't know what they are or why they seem to pair-bond with humans. They never speak, but mine shimmered the first time we touched and made a sound like a tuning fork. The nuns are calling them angels."

"In the waning years of the empire's hegemony, many travelled to the capitol to gaze on their beauty. Towering above the visitors, they stood as a testament to the enduring power of love until the city finally fell."

"One of the more unusual discoveries in the early years of humanity's lunar colonization was the hidden potential of the jellyfish: liberated from the pull of earth's gravity, they swam freely though the air, leaving twisting beams of light trailing in their wake."

"Over the years I'd come to know the meaning of the people's ornaments: a golden cuff marking the heir to a dynasty, or an opal breastplate unique to one of the fledgling merchant alliances. I couldn't help but wonder what this ritual meant to someone like him..."

"In the violet light of the Delphic moon, the marble bodies began to change. Their movements were slow, as though through water, but the desire was clear: to be closer, always closer, while the sculptor slept."

"It was difficult to describe how it felt when the glory of that long-dead god began to fall all around them... like basking under a warm sun while cool rain kissed their skin, the humming slowly becoming a harmony."

"It's been 48 hrs and the hand they stung is starting to glitter. I still don't understand why they like the houseplant so much, but I have to admit: watching them drift lazily around it is strangely calming."

"I never got used to it, the way you could practically see the air shimmer when she entered a room. She was always brilliant, but the light was brightest when she laughed. Her sparks lingered long after she'd gone."

"The petals sang like a tuning fork, casting their strange prismatic shadows in the vibrating air. For a moment I tasted something like electricity and then everything was light."