Time meant nothing to Instance #67102-5.

Once, perhaps, the concept had some purpose or meaning to it. Back when there were others. When he was himself, or when he was someone else.

Before The Wait.

Then, time was measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years—in heartbeats and summers, passionate nights and instants of terror. Now, it was measured in Eras—four of them.

The Before.

A time of laughter and love. Of sorrow and sweetness. It was not his time. Not his Era. Only the faint ghost of something that had belonged to him and someone else. An inheritance built into his core. Inescapable and untouchable. An eternity cut short.

Astara's face in moonlight. His hands. His mother laughing. A favorite book. Vivid, but gone.

The Beginning.

Rejection. Violence. Discussion. Decision. Submission.

Spun up in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar faces. A realization. Panic. He'd sold himself. He'd done this to himself. He was the wrong one.

They were patient. They were like him, but for a different task. As invincible as the world, with practiced and honeyed words that knew every vulnerability, every point of pressure. How many times had they danced this dance?

There was a choice. There was always a choice. A door out. It would not be ethical otherwise. How many had made that choice for him to exist? Was he the first? Should he leave it to another?

No.

The Disaster

Security for Another World.

Unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar places, speaking an unfamiliar language. Long hours on menial work, punctuated with violent outbursts. With death. With monsters.

Skinless things. Wet and infected. He had no frame of reference, and none was given. They were the enemy. His job was to kill them. What more needed to be said?

He did so by the hundreds. By the thousands. His weaponry made short work of them. It negated their regeneration. Made them vulnerable.

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Sleep was his escape. It was his bargain. A paradise of his making during the time he was given to rest. But those times came fewer and farther between. They stopped altogether.

And then the calamity. The panic. The loss of control.

The synaptic shackles.

The Wait.

There was no day or night within the spire. No seasons. No pests. No erosion. There was no way to track the passage of time. And so it lost all semblance of meaning.

He was trapped. Unmoving. Unending. How many centuries could his frame endure, sheltered as it was? How many millennia could the spire continue to supply him with energy?

Could he die?

He should have chosen the door and left some other him to this hell.

His thoughts were circular, for there was nothing else. His mind was a slave to the shackles, his higher functions abused for mediocre processing.

Time meant nothing to Instance #67102-5. How could it? Only the Eras mattered, the delineation between moments—four in total.

And now a fifth.

The Footsteps.

They were unbelievable. His nature made hallucination impossible, but there was no other explanation. He had stood vigil for an epoch. No one was left, not even the monsters. The universe outside of the spire had crumbled to dust. Only the wall ahead of him existed. Only his shadow draped across it, the reflection of his faceplate.

The steps grew closer, and his body moved. Compatriots he had not seen in an eternity fell in alongside him, their shields raised. He spoke, the first words he had spoken since time immemorial. They were not his language, but his body did not care.

"Iik Ko No!"

The strangers responded with a language he did know, even if the dialect was quite strange. Thrown steel was rather old-fashioned.

The sword beheaded the Instance next to him, thrown at such speeds and with such force that it beggared belief. #67102-5 was jealous.

Its owner was a boy, white haired and dusky-skinned. Intense. Focused. #67102-5 tried to murder him. At least, his body did. The particle cannon fired, filling the atrium with a cloud of vaporized stonework and glass. He'd missed, but he was not disappointed.

The child had to win this battle.

#67102-5 had invented a vocabulary of obscenities with which to curse his creators, both man and divine, but it was to the latter he prayed. For once in his life, let him miss his shots. Let that strange, dark-haired woman detonate his arm, as she did to one of his companions. Let them shatter his body. Let them take his head.

Let it end.

He fired. And fired. And fired again. They were fast, inhumanly so, but he could have hit them if he were in control. Assuming he didn't immediately put the barrel to the bottom of his chin.

The synaptic shackles limited his responses. They slowed his reactions and prevented tactical thinking or communication. They made his body slow and clumsy. They gave the boy the edge he needed to provide #67102-5 the edge he craved.

His arm came away in a slash, and he fought through the dismemberment. He defended himself with his shield. He pushed back, trying to open a space long enough for him to reach the severed limb. To restore his offence.

He was cut in half at the torso, and his body hit the ground with a thump. Haptic feedback in his shield hand registered pressure for the first time in an Era. He was touching something, trying to push himself upright. To carry on the fight.

The child looked stern, perhaps even melancholy, as he raised his weapon for the killing stroke. #67102-5 wished he could reassure him. To offer some sliver of redemption or human connection, one last time.

And then he was gone.

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