Epilogue

My name is Marina Vitanova, the new and beautiful chief of operations in the engineering group The Disciples of Dhanvantari. I’m coming back to the Three Deity Temple, 1 year after the incident where a coalition of religious fanatics made a terrorist attack. We are just performing the yearly maintenance checkup, very mundane and boring to be honest.

The terrorist had been working on their attack for years, infiltrating all sorts of spaces and groups in order to execute their plan. In total 11 people were deemed guilty of participating in their criminal activities, 8 of which died as a result of the attack by either the explosions or the drones. Several coalitions of religions and countries are still searching for any residual members or similar groups to prevent something like this from happening.

Everything is going according to plan, although now it is far more annoying and takes way longer than the year before. The terrorist attack ramped up the security in the temples, adding a lot of extra steps we must go through to do just about anything, geez…

Anyway, it is nice to see that the GMs are working not only as expected but better than the predictions said. I guess the maintenance team has done a much better job identifying when something was getting damaged and acted before it could get worse and affect other components. And it isn’t only that, the support they have given to their communities has been described as more human and personal. Of course, some factions of the religions and philosophical schools have not appreciated this new tone but for the most part it has been applauded. If you ask my professional opinion, that vocal minority that has rejected the change can get lost in a forest for all I care.

It has taken almost two weeks of checking and doing fixes when necessary. Well, we have also taken it easy and chatted with old friends like Captain Liu but enjoying life and getting to know the people besides you is very important. Besides, they already paid us for the two weeks of work so as long as everything is as good as possible by the end, it doesn’t matter how we do it.

Now, the only thing left to check is the Database Room, to which I’m going at this very moment. Before we wouldn't go inside it unless there was an issue with the hardware reported by the GMs but now we have motives to check it annually. Still, it is a very easy job so I’ll do it myself… well that and another reason.

The doors open, I enter and place my bags on the table near the entrance. From it I take a med-kit, a bottle with red wine and a cute plastic straw with strawberries printed on it. After walking a minute or so I see her, my dearest friend.

Numa looks almost the same as that day, when we opened the doors and locked them by the security protocol. Back then she was on the ground with her nose bleeding and with only one eye open. We tried to unplug her but whenever we started the extraction procedure her heart rate would rise to the roof. In the end we decided to leave her here, connected to the GMs while we investigated the situation; seated on a sofa and connected to devices to monitor her health. By the way, that investigation resulted in very little, basically only telling us that the GMs now recognize her as different from them but necessary.

And there she sits still, with just one eye open looking at the horizon and only occasionally darting her eye around a little, but never acknowledging me or anyone else. And yet I can’t help but feel like she knows I’m here, as the very few people that can come and see her describe Numa as having a neutral or serious expression. But every time I come she has a subtle but most honest smile on her face.