Enevelen laying along the edge of a rocky cliff whilst looking out at the roaring ocean. In the distance, the sun sets over the horizon of the sea. [https://i.vgy.me/IoTdqw.png]

Enny knelt down in the dirt, allowing her feet to rest after a long, wandering trek. The seaside grass was clustered, mixing with sand that had wandered its way to the cliffside. Chlorophi stood behind, continually picking at a loose metal bit that frayed from their shoulder. The ocean before them was incredibly vast, a massive, swirling expanse of blue and white that had become darkened and tinted orange as the sun began to set. It had grown large and all-consuming, and its prominence along the horizon of the west coast ocean made it difficult to avoid staring into. Enny and Chlo's shadows stretched far behind their feet along the grassy cliff, like endless streaks of black. Below them, waves crashed and exploded against the rocks with enough force to toss small droplets up toward the two of them, sitting thousands of feet in the air. Enny felt several of them land on her chassis and slid back away from the cliff edge to avoid this. The acidity of the ocean was deadly to even the most hardened of cyborgs.

"I guess I'm just curious how it all happened," Chlo hollered, trying to maximize her vocal speaker to combat the roar of the waves below."Like, in your perspective. You lived through all of it, right?"

Enny continued to stare out at the horizon, with no desire to move. Her work rarely ever took her out here, as it was more than a month's walk across the Hourglass desert to the western sea. She had only ever visited the coast on business, because otherwise it was a dangerous area due to the prevalence of scavengers.

"It was our- I mean, their own negligence," Enny called back. It was a very noisy sunset, unfortunately. The ocean was forcing them to be short and articulate with their speech. "I guess the humans thought it was reversible, or maybe they just forgot that it wasn't. I don't remember."

Looking down, over the edge at the height of the cliff, Enny could see that its inside had been violently eaten away by the acid. The corpses of dead sea life bobbed above and around the surface of the waves, kicked up by the ocean current to be deposited onto the hostile architecture of the rocks beneath the cliff face. Many of them had been dead for several decades, if not at least a century at this point, their bodies littering the floor of the sea in a mass grave, generations of dead fish, coral, and the occasional aquatic mammal. The strange nature of the salt and acid that the oceans had become, coupled with thousands of barrels of improperly disposed-of waste from various wars of the past hundred years had caused the remnants of the near-extinct undersea world to decompose at an incredibly slow rate. Broken pieces of bleached coral reefs, species of all shapes and sizes, were kicked and thrown about by the rocks, some falling to the rotten beaches that had formed nearby. Enny, leaning a bit too close to the edge of the cliff, knocked over with her foot a small pile of rocks and gravel. The pile went tumbling down from the cliff, colliding violently with the piercing rocks below and exploding into a thousand pieces. Enny's foot slipped once, twice, over the edge before it was able to regain its place away from the distant drop of the cliff. Her body collided with the ground with a loud THUNK as she frantically clawed along the dirt away from the edge. Frightened, she scrambled her armored legs and arms back and away to the safe chalice of grass where Chlo had decided to sit.

Enny clutched at Chlo's leg, shaken from her proximity to the drop. As she had watched the gravel fall she had caught a brief glance of the twisting, contorted remains of a paculiar pink, fleshy thing being juggled around in the surf below. Its jaw had become dislocated, leaving the mouth of the creature agape in an eternal scream. Its eyes had dissolved into two dark holes in a misshapen head, staring out at nothing. She had not been able to tell if the body had still had its lower torso attached. It had only appeared briefly in the periphery of her vision as she had fallen, but after her mind had processed the visual, once she had crawled away from the cliff, the retrospective image of it in her mind played over and over. It repeated again and again, her brain trying to process what the shape had been. To her it had resembled a pre-augmented human body, but among the mummified, dissolving graveyard of fish, it really could have been anything. The acid had done unspeakable things to the anatomy of these creatures, so she wouldn't have been surprised if it had actually been the rotten body of a seal.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"I... um... well," Enny tried her best to continue her thought. "After the last war, um, I was kind of in hiding for a while. I felt terrible about... everything."

Enevelen stared up at Chlo from below their metal feet, who seemed to be looking down at her in silent curiosity. She continued.

"We all just wanted to stop fighting, um, our leaders collectively decided to abandon their posts. You'd think there'd be a power vacuum, but I don't remember anyone taking advantage of that. I think everyone was just too tired to keep fighting. Pretty soon, all the countries' militaries and their... I guess their governments, if you can call them that after all the disorder, they were all formally dissolved. It felt so unreal, like a fantasy. It all happened so fast, everyone just... gave up."

Chlo nodded. "Yeah, I heard they just all agreed to shut everything down, right?"

"Well, so they did decide to um... form a huge movement. I guess. It was like an anti-war, deindustrialization, decentralization of power... lots of big D words. Everyone just kinda of tore it all down. All of us soldiers helped them do it. That was like... our new purpose. We honestly couldn't imagine not having a purpose, you know. We were all very one-track-minded like that."

"You were programmed to be that way. Following orders and stuff."

"Yeah, that's right. I was probably the worst of it, you know. My mentor, Nnolyth-Ma, had to like, I guess I told you this already, he had to spend at least sixteen months with me in that temple that I stayed in. I was really stubborn, I couldn't handle the idea of... I guess not having orders to follow, or maybe just not having a country behind me."

"Sixteen months..." Chlo repeated in surprise.

"Yes, um, he was very patient with me..."

The sun continued its descent. The ocean had turned a full golden yellow, almost as if the two horrible tyrants of an unnatural world were duking it out for control of the horizon. For the earth itself, even. Enevelen knew the acid would inevitably win, but she knew the earth's unrelenting heat lamp would be a tough contender.

"... But yeah, We called it the Peacemaker Era. We were making peace. It was a very optimistic time, and I think it was around... twenty-one-fifty...? Twenty-one fifty-two...? We wrote up a plaque and everything. I really enjoyed it personally because it felt like I had rules again. A mission. No more violence, we just tear it all down and build something new. It was nice, I'd consider it my "second" lifetime, I guess."

"Your stint in the military was the first, and I guess you'd consider this maybe your third, right? Or, do you consider this your second still...?"

Enny paused at the question. "If everything had turned out okay, I suppose I'd still consider this my second."

Chlo continued to stare out at the sun. Without any physical eyes themselves, the bright light did not bother the plant. Enny had no clue to what capacity their body allowed them to see, whether it was something resembling human sight or if it was something more abstract. It was an interesting thought. She wondered what her form looked like to them, through their mechanical eyes.

"No, that all ended when um... the climate crisis, I guess."

"Well, wasn't that earlier? The early twenty-first century, or maybe even the twentieth?"

Enny nodded. "Yeah well, that was when it started getting really bad. It was fossil fuels and stuff. Later on though, in the mid-twenty-first, you know, it became much worse. I guess we'd delayed it for a while with quick fixes, like early terraforming and nanobots in the sky and stuff, but eventually the whole planet just started eating itself. The land flooded, the desert rolled in, the oceans turned to acid... It brought that whole era of optimism and whatever to a grinding halt."

"It's interesting to hear you tell it, your experiences," Chlo mumbled. "All the cyborgs seem to remember it differently."

"We had to be very thorough with the adoption of augmentations, even the people who hadn't been in or hadn't been affected by the wars. It wasn't just to ascend like, to a higher state of existence or whatever, like we were preaching during that time, but like by twenty-seventy-five when all the Shoeboxes started popping up, you had to have augmentations to even survive outside of a cave. Even the air had become poison."

Chlo continued to stare.

"I don't know. I've told you a lot of this already. I didn't want to go.... I didn't want to give up my body. So I started working again. You know what happened."

"...Yeah. I mean, you've never told me ALL of it..."

Enevelen's mind flashed back to the corpse, rolling in the ocean. The sun had set at this point, the blip of orange finally being engulfed by the mouth of the dark sea. Enny looked back towards the horizon, watching as a green flash briefly escaped the lip of the sea, before disappearing.

"I just hate remembering, I guess," she grumbled, a sentiment of frustration lingering from her electronic, sample-heavy voice.