Time for the second sunset. The test snails had not yet taken out their antennae. A dinner of white roses was cooling on the rosette. I adjusted my eye to the galaxy to the left. There, to the south, in the very pulp of the halo, I was living out my seventh rebirth.

  ... It was just a short time ago. My brain is still under the weight of bytes, and the memory archives had not yet been zeroed out. I was a cat. A blind cat that had been kicked in the stomach. I must have been ugly. I could feel my fur as I licked the slope and dirt off me. It wasn't just that, though. Sometimes hygiene was combined with a pleasant licking of sour cream. I knew I had good fur. But what color was it? That I didn't know. What motivated people to shove me away? The ugly coloring? Or maybe the lack of eyes? It was impossible to predict which side or head you would get hit next. So you had to crawl. And no matter how much you did not want to meet the boot, the nose traitorously bumped into someone's sole. And then there was an unbearable headache and no tears.

  ...I ran away into the woods. And I lived there by a meadow of curly ferns. And I ate worms. Only worms... And then I died under the big wing of the old fern and thought that soon I would be worm food.

  Our first luminary is the Red Star. It doesn't stay in the sky for long. When it is in sight, all the inhabitants of our planet wear protective glasses. Because it's devastating to the eyes. And the second luminary is the Blue Star. It's harmless. It slowly creeps across the sky, coloring the world in blue-green shades so that people's faces seem blue, and everything that is in the spectrum of its luminescence leaves purple shadows. There is almost no night here, no owls fly, no cicadas or field mice live here.

  Now, in my eighth rebirth, I have to do the impossible.

  Gila loved me. I filled my loneliness with her. The loneliness that I had inherited from my past life. The empty spaces in my apartment began to disappear. The air holes were filled with her laughter and the music she played from time to time. Her whispers made the curtains come alive, like a breeze. And when she grumbled, glasses and window panes rattled. Hearing is quite different here in this life. There is no silence here. But I remember it. (Then, in that life, my hearing was tuned to some frequencies and now to others.) But then I decided I needed a baby. A little fuss with filling out paperwork, sending the paperwork to the lab, and you're a Father. Was it revenge on her part? No one will ever know. (She died almost immediately after the unfortunate day, during the mating season of the sharp-winged black butterflies that come to us at this time from a neighboring planet. They copulate right in the air. Millions of them! And people watch this disgusting spectacle from their windows from the comfort of their homes! Even through the windows there is that terrible sound of their wings flapping like heavy black umbrellas. The discharge of the semen of the males of these insects into the air is disastrous to the bronchus. Gila's laxity is what killed her. We should mark nature's critical periods on the calendar. She, on the other hand, fell asleep on the veranda before she realized the horror that had befallen her. Her body shriveled to the size of a dried caterpillar.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  And it seemed that she was about to be filled with the juice of life and turned into the same sharp-winged black monster that was hungry for offspring).

  ...I filled my loneliness by replacing Gila with a son. Everything took on a different meaning. Now my air holes accumulated his thoughts, glasses and windows rattled with his excitement, and curtains rustled as he dreamed in the short nights. And that was the only way I knew him. And that was the only way I knew him…

  Gila worked as a caretaker. He - my son, had already lived through two springs when he had an accident. He was rehabilitating from a bad cut. Gila was at his side. But on that unfortunate day, she left the room without closing the shutters. And he, still small, unreasonable and not inordinately curious, became engrossed in the glow of the light-game crawling on the walls of the ward, new colors he didn't know creating intricate patterns on his delicate body. He jumped off the bunk and looked out the window. The Red Star had sizzled the retinas of his eyes in an instant. My son went blind...

  My son is blind. I'm going to insert snail eyes into his eye sockets. You have to carefully inject ten milligrams of distilled water and add silver nanoparticles. Then they become transparent. And a microchip with a program called “Sight” on it will transmit information to the brain. The only problem is, the snails are too small, and the eye sockets will have to be sutured. I remember in a past life, when I was still hanging around the streets of a big city, I heard advertisements from street screens: “Colored contact lenses. Make your look more beautiful and intense!”. But I've never heard an advertisement talk about changing the shape of the eye sockets! Natural and familiar facial features... Will I be able to keep from scaring him the first time our eyes meet? Will I be able to get used to the fact that my son will now have tiny, two centimeter long slits on his face? Will he recognize me?

  What will the world be like for him? Will others love him?

  My overprotectiveness is unbearable to him and amounts to a kick in the gut. And I know he wants to escape. Because air holes swell with the accumulation of thoughts, glasses and windows rattle and explode with excitement, and curtains rustle predatorily as dreams begin. But curly ferns don't grow here. And he's not a cat. But there are acid lakes here, on the shores of which he is often found. I'm overcome with the thought that he wants to hide under the blanket of this lifeless sludge. I can't lose him. Not because I'm trying to avoid loneliness. It's because I've learned to love. (No one ever loved a blind cat with good fur.)

  Nighttime is the best time to cut the antennae. And my snails are starting to slowly awaken. Surgery is imminent. Memory is treacherously and quite ill-timed emptying its cells. The image of the cat begins its decay. A little more and only his smile remains, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, like a blessing for the upcoming scientific breakthrough.

  The time of the first dawn is approaching. It's time to put on your glasses.