Bim

The meeting concluded and it's various parties went their own ways. Hiiro was the first to depart and Bim followed after him. It was intriguing how this entire building was a monument to the past accomplishments of the human species, yet none of its current human inhabitants seemed concerned for the great wealth of knowledge all around them. The concept of irony was one she was still struggling to grasp in a meaningful capacity, though Bim thought that her interest in human history while said humans were entirely disinterested in it did fit the bill.

Hiiro strode down the eastern grand stairwell with little but cursory glances to the sagas that had been painstakingly detailed all around him. The stairwell itself was a chronicle detailing the collapse of societal limitations imposed on the initial planetary colonists after this world had become sufficiently habitable beyond the archologies and their well-ordered tyranny. The first settlers consumed their supplies, their technology and their very lives to brave the untamed wilds; battling back the savage new world by becoming as savages themselves. Yet Hiiro, and every other human she'd witnessed to date, strode the steps irreverently— blind to the stories they walked upon.

"I should like to see the gardens with you." Bim said once they had reached the ground floor.

"You don't need me to chaperon you about the grounds." Hiiro said, hesitating for a moment, then altering his course away from the palace's central chambers.

"That is correct." Bim stated, following him regardless. "Princess's remark about enjoying the gardens while they last has draw my attention to the ultimate finality of this mortal existence."

"Oh, is that so?" Hiiro asked, noncommittally.

"Yes, it is. I have witnessed your species's capacity for preservation and it is dishearteningly limited. My studies continuously turn up null spaces in available records and no known living witnesses of the events."

"That tends to happen when people die."

In all the histories she'd consumed in her time on this world, she had come across death more often than any other topic. It seemed an innate trait of all humans that they could kill and would die. Military annals had been particularly helpful in shaping her current understanding of just how swiftly humanity could cull its own over any reason conceivable. There were genocides over skin color, wars of ideology, squabbling over resources, territorial disputes, and random acts of violence for no readily apparent reason at all in her eyes. Yet the historians and the chroniclers had always survived to write their works for the ages to come— or so she'd thought. Few of the accounts she'd seen had confessed to being only second or even third-hand retellings of partial lore filled with supposition and pondering on the part of their writers. Bim disliked these works the most, as they were often filled with inaccuracies or wild theories instead of the cold hard facts.

"…I hadn't considered that." Bim admitted. "I understand humans have a great capacity for violence. Could you not exempt some record keepers from your self-destructive slaughter?"

Hiiro took a pensive air about him as they stepped from the palace interior out into the radiant daylight. He was an excellent barometer of the human mind; his body, normally so reserved and tense, was an open book to her. Bim could read him unlike any other human she'd encountered, there was a simplicity to him that she could comprehend. She knew such an association was entirely misplaced, yet there was something undeniably similar about them, something which defied all categorization in her vast intellect.

"Do you know how people die?" Hiiro asked her.

"Of course I do." Bim answered reflexively. "The human body can endure limited amounts of trauma before it becomes an unsuitable vessel for the soul, upon crossing that threshold the soul departs the body, resulting in the death of the empty vessel as it no longer serves a purpose."

"You make it sound so clean and scientific." Hiiro said with a drawn smile.

"My observations are highly scientific, implying otherwise is an insult against my being, Hiiro." Bim stated, evoking a fraction of his name.

There was a hitch to his stride in that moment. A rebellious soul rattling the bars of its cage for a single fleeting instant before returning to dormancy. It was a curious reaction, one she could only elicit in a fraction of the Stalking Shadow's crew. Had she still had access to her full faculties, she could know why with a cursory flick of thought. As it was, she theorized that only those few among the outfit used their true names freely with their companions.

"Ah, sorry. That's not how I meant it." Hiiro said. "You make death sound very clinical. A neat and tidy affair, as sure and steady as longhand math."

"It is." Bim stated, slightly puzzled. "If I were to remove your head at the neck, you would die."

"True, but there are other ways to die."

"Would you like me to explain the multitude of ways your life could be ended?" Bim asked.

"I'll do you one better, I can tell you another way that humans die."

"You have piqued my curiosity." Bim confessed. "Though I fail to understand you rationale in magnifying the theoretical danger I would present should I need to kill humans."

"That's the neat part. Humans can die without being killed by another living thing."

"You speak of 'accidents' then?"

"Nope, though lots of people die to those too."

Bim focused her vast intellect to sifting through all her accumulated knowledge, her memories of learning, pertaining to human mortality. The topic was expansive, humanity seemingly in love with the macabre science of their own demise. Had she not been nailed into the constraints of time by her damningly present body, the task would have been instantaneous, however sifting through her mental archives took longer and longer the more information she accrued.

"Exposure?" She asked.

"Nope."

"Suicide?"

"Nope.

"Disease?"

"Closer, but no."

The periods between her potential answers became drawn out, cumbersome things. In the time it took her to phrase a quarter of her answers they had fully walked the expansive statue garden, the eccentric ornamentation garden and the tranquil water garden— which she had scarcely noticed was filled with pink birds. Bim was running out of ideas as they lazily strolled through the green trees, trimmed and manicured into various shapes and likeness's. She was confident there were still some few potential solutions to Hiiro's vexing question buried in the depths of her mind, but in the end she permitted herself to concede her likely defeat with grace.

"I have expended my knowledge on the subject. You have succeeded in raising my anticipation most excellently, do not disappoint me."

Hiiro flashed a smile she could only hope to one day emulate.

"Humans—really everything for that matter—can die of old age." He said.

The absurdity of the concept caused her to freeze up. She'd seen some humans laugh or rage or decry their opposite in similar situations. Some part of her wanted to try all three in sequence, or perhaps in combination to various proportions. It made no sense. Why would thing simply cease living upon reaching old age? Perhaps it was related to the breakdown of complex chemicals and molecules within a living body, though her understanding of this dimensions foundational building blocks was little more than rudimentary it seemed within the realm of possibility. But if the living body was made of these complex parts, why could it not repair or recreate them and exist in perpetuity? Bim began querying her mental archives for mentions of this universal truth and found nothing of the sort. There was no mention of the human expiration date anywhere in all her studies.

"How old?" Bim asked.

"No one really knows. When your time's up, it's up and that's all she wrote."

Bim blinks her eyes in a gesture of incredulity, it was one of the few human expressions she had managed to passably copy.

"If I understand you correctly, all living creatures could die at any given time for no reason other than they have lived long enough."

"Pretty much, though it generally happens to older folks." Hiiro said with a shrug.

"Specify, 'older' folks. What age is considered older?"

"It was around fifty back home, but it depends on the area and the life. Some are harder than others, they wear you down faster."

There was wisdom to his words, as displeasing as they were to hear. Bim had always considered her fact-finding tour of this dimension to have an unlimited time scale, something to be completed at her indefinite leisure— or as close to leisure as she could get with Treu as her watchdog. Now, things had changed. No that wasn't right. Nothing had changed, she had only learned another rule of this dimension that no one had thought to explain to her until now.

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She'd vaguely known the inevitable heat death of this dimension would be the end of all living beings, but it was very probably that humanity—and their startling tendency to up and die—wouldn't be around to see it with her. What was the point in learning of these creatures if their doom was assured? Would anything she discovered be useful once they were long gone and never to return? Bim had never correlated the fact time would continue its inevitable march once she had returned to her own place outside of its boundaries. Had this reason been why the elders of her kind absconded from this doomed existence, forced to ascend or perish?

"Could this 'timely' death not just be a stage of the natural life cycle of all living being? An ascension of the soul that must leave its prison of flesh behind." Bim asked.

"I don't know. That kind of thinking isn't normally where I direct my thoughts. I used to know a few guys that drove themselves halfway crazy wondering at stuff like that. The way I see it, if you focus on death—the end of your life, however that comes about—then you'll only steer yourself towards it sooner; when that happens, you end up missing all the time in between. It ain't about the destination, it's about the journey. That's how I look at it anyway."

"…I do not understand." Bim admitted.

"It's a human thing. We're all born and we all die, its the part in the middle WE get to decide."

His words were a balm on the doubts she hadn't even realized were spiraling out of control. This reality may be doomed, but that time was far away and she would confront it when she had to, not sooner. For now, she would learn all she could and hope that it was not in vain. Bim allowed herself a tenuous peace in this present moment as she walked through the gardens with her guide.

"You are very wise in the ways of this reality, Hiiro." She said.

Hiiro laughed. Again, it was an earnest display she hoped to one day emulate.

"Not really. All that stuff about life and death, I read it in an old cowboy book. Someone a lot smarter than me wanted that little bit of wisdom to outlast him when his time was up. That's about the closest any of us are going to get to immortality."

Hiiro beckons to the gardens around him, all of them. The towering statues carved from stone to allow the long dead heroes of this land to stand vigil over their former home. The intricate metalwork that was once the highest level of craftsmanship imaginable, now little more than aesthetically pleasing knots of twisted bronze, gold and vanadium. The trees trimmed and groomed every single day so they may exaggerate the beasts of the land and sky and sea. Then there was the water gardens and the flowers, such short-lived beauty rendered in light for some few days before withering to the planet's unrelenting heat.

"We—the people alive today that is—aren't going to be around forever, but we can leave some things behind for those that come next. Sometimes its important to a lot of people, like knowledge or maybe a better world than the one we got; other times it might be something only a few people can appreciate, like a garden that will only be walked by a thousand people before it's gone forever. We never know what will happen when we're gone. Maybe what we left behind will last, maybe it'll get bombed into dust the day after we die."

"I see. The scarcity of these creations and the destructive nature of humanity exist at odds, thus exacerbating both while adding value to the absence of either."

"Sure… but it's like Princess said, we've got to appreciate it while it lasts."

"Because life is a finite resource." Bim summarized, taking the lesson to what passed for her heart.

Hiiro looked out at the gardens, a measure of tension slowly ebbing from his shoulders. She'd noticed this before, he guarded himself from the world around him. Yet now, with her and the relative tranquility of these fleeting relics from a bygone age, he was perhaps not relaxed but momentarily at a greater degree of ease. It was a sentiment she shared with the human, he was by far the most companionable of his species that she'd encountered as of yet. These gardens, this world and all its people would wither and die in due time, but this moment, this single transient span of true peace shared between kindred spirits, was entirely pleasant.

The curious portion of her mind would not be so easily contented. In less time that it took a human to blink, Bim could envision what this place would look like in the end. The water garden would be boiled dry and all its flowers nothing more than blackened cinders on a scouring wind. The durable stone statues would crumble, eroding slower than their living counterparts but still unable to escape the predatory grasp of time. The metal knot work would corrode and rust and decay along with every trace of the human ingenuity that had fashioned it. Bim looked to Hiiro, hoping he would tell her that this future would not come to pass, and in her mind's eye he too became a blackened husk in the shape of a man inexorably falling apart to his composite atoms.

Bim recoiled from the thought with a single step back. The present reasserting itself in her mind. The garden, and everyone in it, were as they should be. Hiiro was still drawing the same breath he had been before her contemplation, but he turned to regard her with a look of concern. How could something so fragile possibly be worried about a being such as herself?

"What's wrong?" He asked.

"How old are you?"

"I would be around twenty-five on Intatenrup, but our years are a little longer than standard so I should be somewhere shy of thirty standard. If you're worried about me dropping dead of age, that shouldn't happen for a long while. How about you?"

"I have physically existed for ninety-seven standard day cycles, though I have existed outside of this reality for… There are no words to describe it to you precisely. I existed outside the constraints of linear time. You could consider me to be 'young' among my kind, though such a term is wildly inaccurate, it is the closest near-relevant, easily-comprehensible way to describe the abstract longevity of my existence."

Hiiro chuckled again. His concern had vanished, her control over her vessel now reasserted.

"I keep forgetting that you aren't really human, then you go and drop something like that on me. What's it like, being a devil?"

"What is it like to be a human?" Bim countered, her words having more bite than she'd intended. "These are both difficult questions, worthy of a lifetime of study."

Her words had a flippant tone to them, ringing sour in her ears. One of his lifetimes perhaps, but not even a rounding error of a fraction of her own theoretical immortality. Bim found herself cursing the knowledge he'd gifted her. All the majesty of this world, of these people who were her partners on this adventure into the unknown, now had a nagging, jagged edge she knew she could never fully ignore. Even should her vessel be destroyed, she would outlast it all.

"Many hands make light work." Hiiro said sagely.

"Would you like to aide my search for the answer? There's a tangential-probability that there will be some overlap to these lines of inquiry."

"Sure, if I can find the time." He said with another easygoing chuckle. "Why do you want to know what it's like to be human anyway?"

"…I thought you were cute."

Her answer seemed to satisfy him, though she failed to grasp the finer complexities of human expression, and they continued their walk about the gardens for a time. Bim speculated that yet again she was getting more out of their surroundings than Hiiro was, his head hardly turning to regard the generations of work that would soon be destroyed for the sake of fortification. His body had regained its vague rigidity about the spine, shoulders and arms the longer they walked together, drawing nearer the palace with every step. Only when they'd stepped into the shadow of the palace did Hiiro turn to face her.

"I should get back to work…" He said, reaching a hand up to scratch his neck.

Bim stared at him expecting him to do just that, but he hesitated, lingering in front of her with far more stiffness than he traditionally wore in the presence of other humans. She considered her arsenal of human farewell remarks and none seemed appropriate for the situation.

"I've got to brief Celio… and the minefield won't dig itself." He continued.

"No, it will not." Bim confirmed, wondering just why he felt the need to state such a thing.

"I'll uh, I'll see you later then."

"That is probable." Bim confirmed again, confused by the sudden change of his demeanor.

"I'll just be leaving now then. B-Bye."

Hiiro reluctantly took his leave, glancing over his shoulder as he did so. Bim attempted to puzzle out if she had failed to appropriately conduct herself, but there was no evidence that she had. None of her previous interactions with any human had ended with such reluctance from her social opposite; most of the humans she spoke with were more than eager to abscond from her company for one reason or another. She wanted to inquire about it, but the first person she thought to ask was purposefully striding away from her. Bim put the encounter and all relevant situational information aside for later investigation.

Or that's what she would have done, but her new nagging sense of finite time compelled her against putting things off until convenient.

Suddenly, every single thought she'd set aside for 'later' became an immediate concern. She would aways have later for those questions that she couldn't get answers to, but those who held relevant knowledge might not. Much like the historians of old, they might die and take their flesh bound understandings of this dimension and its peoples to the afterlife with them. There was no guarantee these fragile humans would maintain their consciousness after death for any length of time, Bim's limited exposure to the souls of the recently deceased reminding her of just how infantile these slaves of time were in matters of the soul.

The most expedient solution would be experimentation and observation. She could force as many test subjects as needed to prematurely expire, then interrogate them for information they had held in life, detailing their rate of decay and informational integrity against a live human control group. If she'd had full access to her faculties, it would have been a rudimentary task. She could have even done so and remained within the confines of the 'tourist contract' she had entered with Treu's employer; it would have simply required her to outsource the termination of her test subjects to another. Given the human penchant and capacity for selfish violence, she suspected that wouldn't be particularly difficult.

While both logical and efficient, this plan hinged on her ability to perceive, interrogate and if needs be consume human consciousness severed from their living vessels. All abilities that her Tormentor had seen fit to remove from her repertoire. So long as she wore the soul-dampening torc and bore the accursed device of metal and bone grafted inside her back, this avenue of inquiry was denied to her. Naturally, as part of her tourist contract she'd been forbidden to remove either under pain of being 'poofed' and worse. While she loathed to give any credit to Treu, he had displayed a keen insight into her kind's dogmatic adherence to their agreements. It was likely she could remove both devices herself and in doing so regain enough of her sealed capabilities to resist her Tormentor, but she wouldn't. It was against her nature to break oaths or utter lies.

Bim spent long hours in introspective contemplation, prematurely ending only when her mind became aware of a pale woman repeatedly waiving a hand in front of Bim's face while utter profanities under her breath. Bim slowly blinked, then marginally turned her head to fully regard Princess. Bim's copied human eyes plumbed the depths of their purple opposites, Princess's own gaze flicking about her person, as if catching fleeting glances at things otherwise unseen.

"Yes?" Bim asked, in that annoyingly human way of asking a question without asking anything at all. Princess took the indifference in stride.

"Do you sleep on your feet with your eyes open? I've been standing here for five minutes."

"I was… thinking." Bim stated, irritated to be drawn from her higher contemplations.

"Well you've thunk long enough. Celio's finally getting his motorcade as soon as Leeroy and the gang get the groundcars up here. He's specifically requested you to be his arm candy. Come on, there's work to be done."

Bim cocked her head slightly, copying the gesture of human curiosity— unnaturally, if she'd interpreted Princess's reaction correctly.

"Define 'arm candy.' I'm unfamiliar with the term."

Princess smiled wickedly— perhaps even disingenuously, though Bim was no expert on such things.

"It is a prestigious position envied by members of the fairer sex everywhere; one that suits your skill set and technical competencies perfectly."