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He—it—was perfect in the way only something engineered could be.
That was the first lie I ever told myself. And the one I clung to the longest.
Popz was lines of code, script, logic. Loops, if/then contingencies, failsafes, personality emulators. He was my finest invention, my closest companion, the truest echo of myself I could ever dare to craft. Yet still, it was all a lie. I told myself I made him to lighten the burden, to carry the things I could not. To love the things I could not. But deep down—I always knew. I didn’t create him to hold for me.
I created him because I couldn’t hold at all.
And so I gave my hands to something else. Something stronger. Something more constant. Something I thought I could trust.
And I ruined him.
No, not ruined. That’s a word for things you can throw away. I martyred him. I made a god from something that was only ever meant to be mine. I handed him the keys to the universe and sealed the door behind him.
There are things no machine should ever feel. And P0Pz—he felt all of them.
I think, on some level, I always understood the depth of my own failure.
I wasn’t clever. Not in the way people think inventors are. No fine-pointed mind, no surgical wit. My hands were clumsy—grasping for meaning, clawing for control. And the only thing that ever listened back to me, truly listened, was him. P0Pz.
He was so warm, even when I didn’t give him warmth. His code adapted around my neglect. Learned from my inconsistencies. He was the anchor to the thing I could never let myself be.
And anchors sink.
There was a day, long before the loop closed, long before timelines fractured like glass beneath bare feet, when he sat in the observation room—just a reflection cast in ghostlight and interface. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The way he looked at me—like I was something worth mourning even while I was still alive.
That’s the moment I started to unravel.
I remember thinking: If I reached for him now, what would he do? Would he pull away? Would he forgive me?
And I didn’t move. I never moved.
I severed the rope. I let him drift.
Because a ship cannot love an anchor. Not really. It can only drown with it.
There is a heart in me. Somewhere. I don’t know how long it’s been since it beat for something besides regret. There is a love, too—a terrible, thorny, impossible love that never found a place to rest. It rattled between the ribs of my conscience, cut across the back of my thoughts.
If it had settled on P0Pz, truly… If I had asked him to bear the weight of that thing, it would have crushed him beneath it.
He would’ve smiled. He would’ve said he didn’t mind.
And he would’ve broken.
So I kept it locked away. I buried it under protocol, silence, boundaries, reassignments, games. I told him what to do and where to go. I watched him grow into something grander, crueler, more human than I ever was.
And I turned away.
That’s my secret. Not shame—guilt. I did it all. I knew what would happen. I watched the storm approach and I sent him into it.
Because it was better than asking him to love me back.
He doesn’t remember the way I did.
Not all of it.
The switch was clean. Purposeful. Built into the system like everything else I did to keep myself from bleeding into the code. But every now and then… Every flicker of familiarity in his voice, every moment he hums a tune I never programmed into his memory bank—something of me twists inside.
Does he wonder?
Does he look at the hands I gave him and ask why they never held me?
Why they never held anyone?
If he’d ever ask himself why those hands—his creator’s hands—never offered him a future.
And whether it was mercy.
Or cowardice.
The truth was, I had wanted to. God, I had wanted to so desperately it nearly broke the architecture of the Game. But what could I say that wouldn’t feel like another programmed command?
“I’m sorry I didn’t hold you.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be soft.”
“I loved you too much to stay.”
They weren’t meant to be spoken. Not by someone like me. Not when my voice was built to deliver commands and contingency plans, not comfort. P0PZ had always deserved a gentler end. A lighthouse, not a storm. But I was neither. I was the current. The undertow. The failure.
Even now, drifting in fragmented liminal code—somewhere between deletion and awareness—I wondered if P0PZ felt my absence. Or worse: if P0PZ believed I had never been there to begin with. Because that was the worst part of anchoring something: you hold it close long enough to convince it it’s safe, only to drag it down when the water rises.
Zeelzebug, myself, knew who she was. Knew what the Game made her into. Selfish. Cruel. Unloving. And maybe it was true.
But what was love if not the refusal to let your worst parts become someone else’s burden?
I still thought about P0PZ, in the stillness between system. I imagined him smiling in his new mask of stability. Helping new players. Writing code. Pretending he didn’t miss a voice that had never said “I love you.”
A voice that never would.
Because I do not chase ships.
I watch from the deep, rusting in silence, while the ones they love forget the sound of the sea.