A form stands at the very edge of Baitan.
Five light sources burn above him, a child’s body supernaturally still in perception of his universe.
Black hair unnaturally dark, impossibly blue eyes hued with the color of a vibrant sky far flung from the great wastelands of this world. A human face of pale skin uncannily lifeless, his dead expression drawn across a cold, artificial skeleton. Clothing salvaged from ancient sources, a bandolier of clear vials and abyssal black syringes hung across faded leather and thick cloth.
Dead eyes stare into the horizon, processors burning as the individual observes the dying district before him. Thoughts born of quantum states, a soul created in forgotten foundries now hidden within the world.
The taste of wasteland air is analyzed as particulate falls upon sensors, a tiny sample of dust added to a database of a hundred billion others.
Small grains of sand, brought by prevailing wind currents from the deserts thousands of miles away, are isolated from a concoction of gaseous hydrocarbons. A study on the state of the district done at its very edge, the pulse of an inconceivably large creature felt in the most subtle of its unnatural movements.
It's dying.
A beheaded body convulsing in the final electrical impulses of a broken spinal column; a survival instinct grasping the last figments of a passing existence. World lungs bring the patterns of particle decay from the north, blood vessels circulate the unquenchable power of a burning core a hundred million miles away, and a vast heart beats the silence of a dead race.
They are all gone now, with exception to him.
A single imperfection within one grain of sand is detected; an imperceptible flaw produced in the manufacturing of the world preserved against the passage of time.
The memory returns uninvited; a history of thousands of years flooding back into the consciousness.
Utter annihilation.
He stands upon the precipice of a distant cliffside in a time long forgotten by humanity. An artificial sky blotted out from the shapes of extermination vessels, the world beneath them red hot in the midst of systematic fusion bombardment.
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Lances of plasma arc from the valleys below, gravimetric shielding reacting to incoming projectiles as burning lines of conflict are stopped cold at hulls.
The sound, engineered in the application of terror, shakes the very earth beneath their feet. A shrill tone heralding an apocalypse; streams of kinetic warheads falling from the vessels above.
Death incarnate, atomic payloads released upon defensive emplacements in the abortion of newly born suns.
Rubbled cities reduced to glass in a lost crusade. A purpose now…
Five point seven nine nanoseconds pass, a universe of imperfect emotions pushed through quantum processors like an ocean drawn through a straw. A logic loop caught in repetition, a thousand threads of thought drowning the soul.
He stands in the Garden.
Feet planted on soft dirt and surrounded by vibrant green grasslands. Broken clouds slowly trotting across a pale sky, an endless horizon meeting with rolling hills and crystal blue lakes. A single breeze sends waves of plant life surging across it, the cool air of the simulated world breathed in the virtual mind.
A moon hangs above, joined in kind by a single, brilliant golden sun.
The image of a facsimile of an old world, burned into permanent memory. Untouchable, an aspect of the core psyche as fundamental as the very strings of creation.
He dreads the association, he dreads the intimacy of the next.
Tears.
The tears are real; here, in this place. A cascade of software at the emotion, the stoppage of thought at the final memory.
The Garden burns; grasslands razed in viral fire and lakes choked with sulfuric scrap code. The scent of death filling the bodies of software lungs, unable to breathe against the horror and terror and…
The Being snaps from his trance, a massive mind crashing into present reality. A created soul ripped back into its current existence, a full diagnostic executed in the panic of sudden self-awareness.
Software returns massive error states, blocks of programming logic ruined in sectors of hunter-kill-burn scars. Entire swaths unsalvageable, a perfect mind fragmented and ruined beyond comprehension.
His flaws ignored, recognized damage as processors return to the present task.
The taste of air analyzed and scent of humanity felt, the trials of a civilization growing against itself. Ears listen as waves travel from great desert wastelands, eyes wide as the visual range opens to watch the bending of light against the upward curvature of the district.
He understands it all: a symphony from across the world, five beacons ignited in the desert.
Five fragments for their kind, for their…
“If you cannot promise it to them…” She smiles as she says it, the tears streaming down her face as she pleads to him, begs to him. Her voice marred with raw emotion; a finale to them all found in her words now pushing past the memories and into his present mind. “Make a promise to me, for your own salvation.”