What is there immune to the unfettered passage of time? Great works and civilizations crumble, their foundations sinking to never be seen with awe and wonder. Monuments and histories weather to obscurity with none to lay claim to their grandeur. Names and titles and accolades too numerous will just molder and decay as the world that laid them dies.

As something else, something new moves to take their places. Resetting and asserting authority, laying its own claim to what has been left in the wake. On those that survived and only fight the inevitable. But that is a wide strand to pull and unravel. Context matters and subject colors expectations. What is it that you will lay claim to in this, your contested environ, I wonder?

Maybe… Maybe you’ll be the best horticulturalist around? Coaxing, guiding your new chlorophyllic landlord into intricate paths to mark this place as your home. That… will just end up being covered regardless. Yeah, The Green doesn’t care. It will just spread out in all directions like a fine carpet of leafy slime mold.

So, maybe you’ll rebuild what was lost? Reshape it to fit this new paradigm and live in harmony with… no. No that won’t work either. The Green will see no rivals to its desires and designs. Allow no blocking of its most precious of commodities. It demands direct sunlight and will go on eating away at all in its path. Chewing with acidification and mineral uptake, turning concrete to powder in a matter of years. Ignoring the advantages that shade provides it. At least it’s self-defeating in the end.

But what does that leave for you in this world being subjugated by maladapted moss? What is there even left to do as it slowly takes hold of every aspect? Just sit back and enjoy the life you have? Yeah, that seems about right.

And you certainly have the time to waste, the years already piling on and yet looking not a day over… Well I don’t know, but you’re certainly older than you look. And if the sun soaking verdanince in your veins has anything to say, you’ll be living till its own inevitable end. Watching on as the world is subsumed in a vast green shag of contours and hills. As it’s eaten flat and claimed in totality by The Green. Watching as the land is either raked in hyper oxygenated fire or dried to brown wilted emptiness. Leaving you… yeah, not much better.

Yeah fuck it, I’d just go back to laying there to. At least these questions keep you sane. Better than the others… Oh yeah, can’t forgot about the others.

The Green is not without its minions, its grander machinations. It was not simple nature given free reign by chance. No, it is a weapon of hegemony. A destroyer of disharmony and variety, and used as such in callous vengeance. It despises all that it coats, metal chiefly as it weathers its storm in rusting stalwart. But it is peculiar when it meets a fellow organic.

Plants are simple, easily taken for their structure and subsumed as more fodder. Their stolen sunshine taken from their hides. But more complex life, more mobile beings, those are harder to challenge. But not immune. Unfettered, open wounded contact breeding a change rather insidious. Alteration but not quite assimilation. Mutation to something more agreeable, dependent. Yet wholly separate and different. Almost harmonious. Almost.

The Green spreading and growing within, digging in from skin to brain stem. Facilitating uptake and reward for doing… well just what you’re doing. Laying out in the sun from your much more mobile vantage. Lounging along shore line and bank aquatic, allowing your new nature to soak it all in. Defying the drying light of that deadly laser.

Yet your master only spreads so much, only grows so dense. Instead using its obscene scalars of excess energy to alter and feed its new host. The resulting form not far from the natural order, not total abomination to the discerning eye. Except maybe for those less open minded, or in the know of the inevitable psychosis.

Life isn’t really meant to change drastically in the short time it occurs. So when you take a human and turn them into, well basically a salamander, they tend to not take it very well. Things that spend their lives breathing from their noses and eating with their mouths don’t really like having to suddenly learn to do both with their skin. Least of all when those orifices close up before they know what’s going on. Yeah, that happens too.

The Green is a bioweapon after all, disruption is its purpose and its wielders were vindictive bastards. The end product just decided to stick around too well after all was said and done, conquering when it should have allowed conquest. Leaving quite a few things in its slow ever churning wake. Like you, who I have been so impersonally referring to.

The lazy hollow boned lay about, lying in the sun all day and contemplating their place in a world no longer theirs to have a say in. But at least moss is comfy, and it keeps you fed. Though few would say the same if they were in the same boat, or faced with your sudden appearance. Least of all because normal salamanders aren’t 6 foot 10! The Green changes the body, but it can only change the stature so much.

So a giant, nearly night black tower of glossy sleekness and wavy green streaks rising over you wouldn’t be a very fun sight. Especially since it’s got claws instead of webbed digits, enough bulk to give pause, and eyes that scream… Content? Yeah, like I said, those questions really do wonders for the id and ego alike. And I swear sometimes it looks like one of those streaks forms a smile across that snout. It’s uncanny.

Anyway, you’re more likely to wave a fine how-do-you-do to any one passing by, rather than eviscerate and feed the ensuing viscera to The Green. Seriously, the others are not right in the head anymore. And thus, rather understandably, you’re all alone. Sequestered far far away from anyone else. The others understandably… but other normal humans more specifically. The why to this lost like everything else decaying to time. None are immune after all.

But this is more expedited and enforced, altered anatomy chilling and slowly etching away at the past even in memory. Instinct and content clashing and melding into a fog of blissful ignorance as your old life fades. Even who and what you were barely hanging by a thread. Yet still you dutifully stay your place, staving off boredom with idle musings on existence. And replaying the faint few memories smoldering in the cool squishy silence that is this relatively new life. No mouth yet no want to scream. Though maybe a bit of regret you’ll never again taste ice cream… Sorry ‘iced dairy product’. The real stuff melted away with civilization.

Regarding the cold though, you certainly have regrets for the colder existence. Few means of generating heat internally definitely amount to another source of dysmorphia. The sun making up for it nicely in the day, but at night things don’t pan out well. Well, except for you that is. Your bed stays warm year round, if seasons still existed in any meaningful manner. Your chosen home a wonder onto itself, a bastion against the rigors of altered existence and apocalyptic degradation. And one last grasp onto a past that is impossible to ignore. Least of all because it stands for itself against the rusting will of The Green.

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Your chosen pond, either incidental or otherwise, looked over and shaded pleasantly by its own iron defender. Scored by orange and red and white metal strata. Blackened and peeling back layers of defense, or melting in slow geologic order with the same glistening result. Leaning just so to one buckled side, one lofty straight leg bearing more weight than the other. And all of it pockmarked and a wash in metallurgic morphology. Fire and weather and oxygen ravaging its once stainless surface. Armor thick yet holed through in dazzling radials, glass and copper glitter haloing their respective cookie cuts.

Mechanisms within fairing little better, no more life left to live in this mechanical marvel. Its gears held fast, its hatches rusted shut or stuck open, and its terrifying armaments fallen to the wayside or expended to emptiness. This once noble guardian of some force lost from your memory, its last gasp ferrying you to sanctuary.

Your own duty clouded in turn, but occupation understood to a t. A mission little more than figments, yet a former life clear as day. To fight the enemies arrayed before you with balefire and tungsten carbide. To rout them wholesale under stomping foot and boisterous recoil. To rule the battlefield from a higher implacable vantage and rain death on those who defied. You were a mech pilot, and your chariot stays by your side ever still.

Even if you barely remember what it was like.

Cass, Micha J. #228745. His only surviving identifier jangling around his squishable neck, putting a name to the fading memories that disappear year over year. Thoughts that sit jumbled, but hold feelings that he could read. Images that remained clouded but still had meanings. Even his own identity was hard to focus on, though he could see his old self sometimes. Freckled annoyances like looking in a mirror out of vanity, orange hair that just seemed to get everywhere, but a smile that couldn’t come from anything but him.

Now though there wasn’t much to go off of, just a name and a strange featureless body rather dissimilar to the one in his dreams. But some little bits of that life still shine through the fog. A wife, maybe. Jess or Gale or something close. He couldn’t quite see them, pull all their pieces together. But the same could not be said for their daughter. Rachael. He can’t forget her. He won’t. Her name was scratched into the back of his tag like it was the last grasp of a mind reaching out. Saving him from the full conscription to The Green’s callous ends. A lot more regret felt in seeing that almost pink little head left behind.

But still the same reassurance that distance was necessary. That this place was prison just as much as it was serenity. The war that dragged him away, in all but known quantities, long over. His wounds clear and lessons learned. Peace was better. It was better to stay put and stay away. Better for the world to be without what brought him here.

And this place, an urbanized Empty Quarter. A city once, yet lost to conflict and common mind both. A name forgotten and faded to something else when wars spilled forth their tribulations. And civilizations lost their good graces with time. It was spared the true apocalypse, avoiding the nuclear fires because it was seeded more insidiously. Its habitation all but denied for greater ages to come. Far more hostile life taking root and laying its claim. What few former populace that survived turned other, feral or close enough to it.

And this new age ill fit the longevity offered. Unperturbed the minions of The Green will last, symbiosis and slower metabolism having at least a few advantages. But war is not the enabler to time, it is pantheon alongside it. And the scavenged weapons and armor strewn about this place certainly even the odds in no one groups favor. They don’t even need to kill you, just hurt you and leave their master to do the rest. Whether you be human or mander like them, you are prey if they so choose. They are still feral after all.

But more close to home the environment is leagues more peaceful than the fervent isolationism of the outer districts. A toppled skyscraper dominating the road ahead, its foundation shattered by the crater dead center to its adjoining T intersection. And forming the shallow pond Micha is half immersed in. The paths opposite and away only somewhat more traversable, piles of rubble turning thoroughfare to hill country upstream. Leaving only the main dead end to keep an eye from. A barren pockmarked straightaway disappearing into the greater distance, leading to who knows what… Okay you and I know full well what, but he doesn’t. Or at least he doesn’t care.

His chosen seating and laying and sunning places more than vantaged. And his hulking home dissuading the ferals with merely half its form turned to meet this path. Also the rust certainly keeps the scavenging types away if any ever come this far in. The crater below it though was an oasis against the dry decay of the straightaway, clear and crisp rain water filling and streaming in from the buildings turned hills.

And all of it feeding and filtering the spread across its shores. That green carpet dominating most everything, nary a nearby flat surface uncloaked in fuzzy deconstruction. Finding every unshadowed path of the sun and fomenting more as it continues on its unperturbed track. Though this place could really use at least something more. Like a palm tree maybe.

But there is, as always, little poor Micha can do. Except see out his days in peaceful bliss, and sleep away his nights in his once manned seat of power turned bed. His mech’s hull like a capsized boat filled not quite to detriment with arrays and armor. A system of cameras, long eroded to foggy stains, dotting between plates. Passing the outside world in without the weakness of a limited view port. Its control surfaces broken and crumpled, peddles for acceleration and a stick for traverse. Independent targeting mastered with the freed up hand. Point and click death by simple gesture. Though again all reduced to pushed aside apparatuses for the only thing left worth a damn.

Five full inches of hardy gel foam insulation, full 180 degree reclining articulation, pop in spacers to fill up and form Bedtron, swivel release for idle traversal and feng shui musings, rumble massagers buried in deep and protected from dilapidation, and a vaunted self-sustaining heat that just keeps warming on and on. The cushions a little worse for wear, but the whole thing wasn’t really designed for an enamored mander the size of a person to roll around in sleepy bliss. And it certainly wasn’t meant to go decades without maintenance. Yet go it still does. Warm it still does. Turn cold heartless night into cozy comfort dreams. Staving off the darkness of irritability and want. And keeping Micha just that little bit of himself in spite of grander machinations.

For as long as it can last. For as long as his mech can keep its vigil. For as long as its power remains seemingly just as everlasting as him. The dim lights of only half dead electronics starlighting his bedroom. Glowing their reds and greens, warning of damage already terminal or systems yet still viable. Most fading away into goodnight drift, just another aspect of mundane paradise to see another day pass without worry. To see time march ever onward unabated.

And yet…

And yet he doesn't see one more important than the rest. To a side behind his curled up back, clicking on and off with no noise allowed to break the silence. Its nob turned just the slightest click from eternally off, still active in spite of an only nine tenths finished attempt. Its dial flicking up with every orange flash, wave form indication of incoming transmission. Automatic tuning finding a voice in the dark, but not allowed to put this signal to air and make that voice heard. Yet ever up its ticks grow, silent rise and fall and rise higher by the meter crossed. Something getting closer… and pinging his radio for its own voice in the dark. Still marking his sequestered home for whoever now seeks it.

For whoever had finally found their goal.