The face that stared into XJ-V’s eyes shone with the light of familiarity.

It was the face of an old man as grey as the walls of the laboratory he stood in, wisps of white hair clinging in small patches to his balding skull. Upon his wrinkled nose sat a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles that gave the Cog a reflection of his self – he was suspended on some kind of large stretcher, chest opened up like a great cavity in the earth. But his eyes were dull and dead. No light shone within him.

Not yet.

His dead eyes looked into the face of the old man as he began to cough and sputter, holding a small microphone up to his gnarled mouth before he spoke. As he uttered each word, voice hoarse and dim as though his lungs were filled with dust, he kept looking back over his shoulder at something behind him.

“XJ-IV confirmed status: inactive. Unsuitable vessel. Cause of expiry: Unstable matrix-bond during the anchoring process leading to erratic behavior changes and system overload.”

XJ-V saw the old man shuffle away from him suddenly, moving around the room to find a flashlight on a table at the edge of the lab. He adjusted the stretcher the Cog lay upon so that XJ-V was now propped up, level with the man, looking directly into his sweating face.

He shone the light into the shell that lay before him – what XJ-V was slowly beginning to realize was his inactive body. His coreless, metal shell.

“New vessel designation: XJ-V,” the aged man stated with mechanical precision, almost as though he were dictating his thoughts to a typist nearby that was busily recording every word and utterance. “Shell composition: solid titanium alloy reinforced with Densitius shards from the Hensha mines. Have compensated local villagers admirably. Know what risks they take. Perhaps they don’t. Doesn’t matter.”

The man spoke as though every second were crucial. XJ-V, looking out from within his old-self, begged him to answer his questions. But his lips did not move. He was as formless here as he was whenever he entered this realm of mysteries.

All he could sense was the distinct lack of Qi in the laboratory that he was sequestered within. Normally, such flows of natural energy swirled around signs of life, or objects created by human beings. Such objects were normally imbued with the essence of their creator – the artistic or aesthetic energy that had been poured into them was visible to a Cultivator that could see the gyrations in Qi throughout the world. But none of that existed in this place. XJ-V at once felt that he was just another Cog again – a dull, dead thing. The sensation did not bring him pleasure.

It brought him disgust.

“Will attempt anchoring in approximately ten minutes,” his Creator was saying as he switched off the flashlight and breathed a heavy sigh, wiping his glasses with a worn handkerchief. “Prime Directives remain unchanged. New shells not arriving until next month. By then…there will be no more time. Proper programming will be necessary if long-term success is to be achieved. Basic self-defense protocols, historical data integration, memory implantation…but one thing at a time”

The man’s knuckles were shaking as he spoke. His entire body was a hunched picture of anxiety, and yet he couldn’t stop himself. Whatever he was about to do, it clearly terrified him.

Yet he was no less determined to see it through.

“People of the village know…” he muttered. “Qing’s commandment will not protect me forever. Or you.”

XJ-V recoiled as he realized his Creator had just addressed him for the first time.

He watched the face of the old man twist into a sad smile, something that filled the Cog with a sense of nostalgia for something he’d never even truly known.

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“XJ-V…” he murmured. “Five vessels. Five Sects. Five years – I wonder, is it chance? Or something else?”

His Creator became pensive. The fast pace of his speech slowed to almost a slur of jumbled words that spilled from his parched throat.

“You would know, Qing,” he said, addressing no one but the floor beneath him. “You always knew. You always saw further than us all. Why you asked me to do this out of all of us…I will never know. If you were here, now…”

He shook his head. XJ-V got the impression that this man was not one who would dwell on dreams or idle fancies.

Such a reality was brought crashing down on the Cog as his Creator moved away from his field of vision and XJ-V finally saw what he had been looking at before.

In a dark, forgotten corner of the laboratory, a selection of broken limbs and fingers were strewn across the ground. Metal wiring, copper teeth, buzzing lightbulbs that would serve as eyeballs were scattered around like a macabre metal butcher’s table.

And at their center sat a Cog in the exact same shape, size, and stature as XJ-V – its eyes totally hollow, its forehead punctured and dripping with oil, limbs splayed out in a gesture of complete surrender to the force that had slain it.

XJ-V opened his mouth in a gasp that would not come. What he saw – what he was being made to see – was a vision of machine death that haunted him more than a slain human ever could. It was like a child becoming aware of their own mortality – the fact that, one day, they would end up just as soulless and husk-like as the wretched thing that lay there in the corner, life long since fizzled out to nothing, dark eyes staring into an abyss from which it would never wake…

And just as his thoughts strayed to that of abyssal nothing, XJ-V was bathed in light.

His ‘expired’ brother’s form disappeared as the Creator came back into the cone of XJ-V’s vision, holding something in his gauntleted hands that shone with a searing, otherworldly power. The face of the creator was covered in a grim death-mask of protective material – something which stretched over his shoulders and covered his body in a funeral gown composed of steel fibers. Only his eyes were visible through the grisly mask, and XJ-V focused on them and them alone as he felt the sphere of energy wedge itself into his chest as though it were clinging to something there.

Then: resistance.

The Creator struggled with the thing as he started to pull away like a bird not wishing to be caged. He began to force it back inside the Cog as the body of machine began to groan and twist, the sinister intelligence brimming within the sphere of pure energy lashing out against this inert creature of the earth.

Just when the Creator seemed to be falling, his strength failing him, XJ-V felt his own will kick in. He felt himself, even through his fear, compelled to reach out and aid the ailing man. He reached out – he reached through the Dao – and added his spirit to the man on the other side.

And though the feeling may have been fleeting – nothing more than a trick of the Dao – XJ-V saw his creator’s eyes fly open as the searing light finally left his hands, becoming locked within the metal chassis of his invention.

The chest of the machine closed, and though its chest smoked and sizzled as though the internal fire trapped within might burn its flesh away entirely, the shaking human had achieved his goal. The light was trapped.

And the eyes of his creation brimmed with fiery life, looking upon the first thing it saw in this world.

“Miraculous,” he said. “Simply…miraculous.”

For a moment, there was only silence. Then the Creator removed his grim mask and protective clothing, panting, sweating, almost ready to double over in pain, and yet the smile that he had flashed at the Cog before had not dropped at all.

When he spoke, it was with the disbelieving love of a father.

“Welcome to the world, XJ-V.”

The Cog in the Dao felt his old eyes look around, prospecting his new, and only, reality. The first thing he felt was the touch of his ‘father’s’ hand, hands cold and strangely solid, almost like a sheath of steel being smeared across his cheek.

“What are your Prime Directives?” his Creator asked him.

Through a voice far more robotic than he had ever remembered having, XJ-V replied without having any alternative:

“Cultivate. Enter the Dao. Merge with the Dao.”

His Creator nodded. “Good,” he said, almost giddy like an infant at Christmas. “That…that’s good.”

With pressure built up from more time than his new creation could know, the old man finally succumbed and slumped to the floor, confusing his newly ‘born’ metal-son to no end, especially when he laughed frantically and shook his head in utter disbelief.

“…we did it, Qing,” he said, hoarse laughter spilling from his throat. “By the Old Gods and the Dao, we did it.”

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