Rain falls gently around me, shading a second layer of grey over the world. Perhaps in a place like this, it is better that not a ray of sunshine penetrates the tight blanket of smog. Better that God cannot see what is happening here, what I am doing.

In lieu of God, my SOUL lingers only a few feet from me as it always does, a fist-sized blue glimmer in a dark embrace, cataloguing my every action, recording every facial expression as it weaves around me like a mindless vagabond.

It doesn’t bother me like it bothers some people - then again, I don’t live for the SOUL, and I don’t make it out to be something it is not. Studded with tens of thousands of nano-cameras, the blue disc is nothing more than surveillance. A storage space that retains memories the human mind has neither the capacity nor the desire to hold.

As I walk through the alleyways of Shanghai’s largest black market, I make note of the people without attempting any direct contact. Vendors line the alleyways with their VR-porn, counterfeit jewellery, and "prescription” drugs.

Striding along, I begin to see kidneys, hearts, brains, sometimes eyeballs. The experienced vendors sell them in pairs, although some mix and match in large tubs of formaldehyde.

I’ve already waded through more than my share of organ black markets; New Delhi, Kuwait, though most of the important organs I bought in the U.S., back home in New Jersey. Some things you can skimp on quality, while hearts and lungs, livers and pancreases - and clean blood - they’re worth the extra dimes.

Today I am here in Shanghai to pick up one specific thing. After this trip, I am finished walking the surface of these hells, buying and trading things that should never be treated as a commodity.

Love makes us do stupid things, not knowing the whys but knowing that it’s worth it.

When I was 12, I met the love of my life and lost him a week later. I went to an international academy in Washington D.C., where eighty percent of the children were military brats. The other twenty, the portion I belonged to, our parents were foreign diplomats. Perhaps we had different conversations at the dinner table, but otherwise our lives were all too similar.

On Friday, our teacher pulled a gigantic parachute out of a crate, a vibrant, all-encasing fabric of every color imaginable.

We were familiar with the game, and everyone went and sat in front of a strip of color.

From across the room, I caught the eye of a boy who sat in front of the same color I did. A cobalt blue, cold and dark like the deep depths of the ocean.

The teacher coughed twice, his mustache jumping with the movement of his lips. “Ready … forest green!”

All at once we tugged up on the ends of the parachute, and the colors lifted off the ground. It was like watching a large macaw take flight in slow motion.

Two shadows zipped under the parachute when it reached full height, and all I could hear were the excited exclamations of the two girls inside as we formed a bubble with the parachute. Giggling, their shadows ooh-ed and ahh-ed until our teacher determined it was time to move on.

“Let’s go, cobalt blue!”

At the words I rose from my seat, and as the parachute ascended to the ceiling and the two girls under it rolled out, I slid in.

The bright warm colors hit my skin, growing more intense as the parachute sealed down on the floor. It was as if the colors were alive, flitting across my eyes like dancers in vivid costume, twirling, spinning. Blush reds, canary yellows, searing pinks filtered the light from above as it bent into my multi-colored fortifications.

I looked at the walls that the parachute formed, staring at the silhouettes of my classmates, whispering and wondering about the happenings beyond the barrier of fabric between us.

And then I turned and saw him.

It doesn’t take long for me to find the dingy shack of a shop near the west end of the market. Naturally there are no signs hanging outside, but one look through the window curtained by dust, catching a glimpse of the spinning, glowing blue disc on the front counter, and I know that I have found the right place.

The man standing behind the counter glances up at me through his spectacles when I step through the door, my feet clacking against the wooden floorboards as I approach.

“Good evening,” the man says, his English coming out in staccato, his consonants soft, the way most Chinese pronounce words foreign to them.

“I called last week for the—”

“The retrograde for the SOUL,” the man finishes for me. He smiles and presses a button on the counter.

A black tint crawls over the windows of the shop, and a bright light floods the room.

“Americans are usually well-mannered people,” he says. “You at least gave me a pleasantry the last time we spoke.”

A small smile touches my lips, but I do not have the desire to reply.

“Your SOUL,” the man says, gesturing at the blue disc lingering five feet to my left. “It’s a fairly new model, 2050s, early 2060s. You’re barely thirty years old.”

“Good observation.”

“If you need more memory storage, maybe an additional angle for your SOUL to shoot from, I have developed a—”

“I’m not interested in anything but the retrograde,” I say, cutting him off. The merchants in Shanghai can be very persuasive if you let them.

For me, if something is not going to help return Liam to me, I have no interest in it.

The man shrugs and pushes forward the blue disc on the counter. “I cannot be blamed for trying,” he says. “Trying feeds my family.”

I examine the disc. It looks exactly like a SOUL, smooth on the top, about as heavy as a hockey puck. But where the nano-cameras should be on the bottom side of the disc, little protruding bumps, there are tiny grooves instead, with clear wires lined through them.

This is what will help me piece together Liam’s life, everything before and after we met, inside and outside the parachute.

“And I just need to turn the retrograde on, let it recognize the SOUL, and signals will flood back into the brain?” I ask him.

“People seem to think that one should need a beating heart to be alive,” he says. “But really, all you need is a vessel, a chip in the brain for storage, and the retrograde can bring back the dead.”

After a moment I nod and pocket the retrograde away. “The money came through okay, I trust?”

“It is always nice to do business with reliable people.” The man pushes the same button on the counter, and the lights in the room darken. The windows lighten from black to grey.

“I hope he’s worth it,” he says as I push open the door.

With the soft hum of my own SOUL hovering close to my ear as I exit the store, I leave the shopkeeper with, “He is.”

As I think about it now, there was nothing extremely handsome about Liam, nothing that would make him stand out in a crowd. He was a plain-looking boy, maybe an inch shorter than I, skinny, brown hair in need of a trim, ears that sat a little high on his head. He was small, innocent, pathetic to the point of cute.

Yet his eyes, those watery blue eyes that could have been composed of crystals of ice, they pierced me with an intensity that only fire could match. I distinctly remember all the colors in the parachute blurring together before freezing completely.

My breath caught in my throat as he approached on all fours, his stare never leaving mine.

And there, in the standstill of time, he melted me with a kiss.

Now standing in front of the body on the table, I reach over and gently brush my fingers across Liam’s lips. The blood is moving through the body, the organs are functioning.

It’s not Liam physically. The only real image I have of him is when we were twelve. I assembled this vessel from the images on his SOUL. It will have to suffice.

The physical does not matter at all, I remind myself as I look over at the blue SOUL sitting next to Liam’s head. Out of everything - the organs, the human skin, the blood - Liam’s SOUL was the hardest piece to attain.

He was stabbed to death near a river in Nebraska. Elkhorn River. I’ve watched the footage from his SOUL time after time. I've memorized every movement, every look of fear, and my stomach never ceases to twist, my chest never hesitates to ache.

But I’m going to make it all better. I’m going to give Liam a second chance, and I will never allow him to be harmed again.

I set the retrograde next to his SOUL and turn it on.

As the retrograde whirs to life, I sit behind the monitor screen and let events unfold. Seven years it took me, scouring the earth for “parts”, visiting places that even nightmares should never dare venture.

Yet half a minute is all it takes for the retrograde to transfer all information, an entire life, from the archives of the SOUL.

So begins the process of reinstalling the memories - every word, every event - into a chip in the brain.

But as I sit here staring at the progress bar, I realise that it is so much more.

Words are capable of lying. People are capable of self-deceit. But a series of actions absorbed by the SOUL, patterns laid down despite words and thoughts, they are raw truths that neither life nor death will ever overturn.

It makes sense in my head, forms goosebumps on my arms.

The information download bar maxes out and disappears, and all of sudden the body on the table stirs.

I force myself up from the seat, knees shaking.

Liam’s eyes snap open and flicker toward me.

“What is going on?”

Touching the side of his head, he blinks and slowly slides off the edge of the table.

“Be careful,” I say, reaching forward to help him. “Test the strength in your legs before trying to walk.”

His fingers curl around my arm with an unfamiliar force, testing out the strength in the new body.

“What is going on?” he asks again, this time turning to stare at me.

I can feel the smile on my face as I look into those eyes of his. They’re just as I remembered them, that shocking shade of blue. It took me two years to find those eyes.

“You really don’t remember me at all?” I ask him.

The frown that wrinkles his forehead tells me that my face does not register to him. I think my heart falls to my stomach.

“I-I’m sorry,” Liam says, letting go of my arm and taking a few steps on his own.

He turns after he has walked five, six feet away. “How in the world am I…?” He lets out a laugh, a chuckle of astonishment that feels like nails scratching against the walls of my head.

He’s back. The love of my life, the beginning and end of my childhood is standing right before me.

Here is the boy who kissed me with an intensity that no one was ever able to match.

Silence fills the spacious warehouse like the sounds of a powerful scream, stabbing at me over and over until I can no longer stand it.

“Love is a funny miracle,” I say, straining to speak. Ever since I lost him, I’ve felt like I was the one who was lost.

And ever since that day, I have walked this Earth with a heart that didn’t feel like my own anymore, wearing secrets that I could only tell Liam.

I grab the SOUL disc off the table and hand it to him. “This belongs to you,” I tell him, and enter the pass code into the security pad on the wall. “Take it and go home to your family.”

The doors of the warehouse slide open, and sunlight washes in, covering the floors, the walls, with the warm yellow glow of autumn.

A certain feeling of weightlessness accompanies the light as it seeps into me, so airy that I feel like flying.

It is the ethereality of realisation.

He steps outside and shuffles away, but not before turning around and giving me a small smile. “And you? Tell me your name, so that I can thank you properly for this… miracle.”

I smile and shake my head. “I’m not worth it.” And as his smile fades from his lips, I close the doors.

The retrograde returned truth, life, solidified a memory until it became reality itself, beautiful and frozen and standing before me.

But I do not want truth, I cannot bear real life, and I never really wanted Liam in the first place.

I want the Liam who cannot grow, cannot age. The Liam who tiptoes on the rim of my dreams, surrounded by color that never seems to dull.

The boy under the parachute.

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