"It's an old-fashioned oxymoron. There is no such thing. But, you must admit, there is something charming about old fashions…" —Ada-1
Ada-1 prefers places to people.
She sits on the hull of her ship, staring out over the wreckage of an abandoned theme park in New Vancouver. Her eyes crawl up the spine of a rusted-out roller coaster with tracks that stop dead in midair, sticking out like a diving board over a 250-foot drop.
She likes empty places like this. Places that were once full. Places where countless people had the time of their lives, and now there's nothing but the remnants.
She thinks of them as shrines to humanity and comes to pay her respects to what humanity was before it all got so complicated.
Sitting in the shadow of the park's sign—ROCK T W RLD, it says, in faded block letters—she drags the toe of her boot through the dirt and feels the weight of the centuries around her. That weight, and the emptiness…
They help her breathe.
She doesn't picture this place in its heyday, thick with crowds. She likes it just as it is now, but she likes to know that it was once full of people. Good people, she imagines.
Now she can sit here alone, with the echo of those people for company, and just… be.
She closes her eyes and smiles.