“Now you are truly outside, woken from the vault, preserved in the drone you were stored within for eight hundred years. This is real existence, Darius. Time to survive. Your turn to bat. Time to step into the box.”

Darius could see the giant metal track. One massive track from a giant mining crane armoured with steel plates was starting to come apart in a storm of epic proportions. The surrounding landscape was awash with a punishing maelstrom of flying sand and rock, but he could just make out what looked like a dome only a short distance away. He knew what it was. Folded into the tornado of a storm was the dome of a crashed spaceport.

Darius searched in the storm for Brock and Nova. He moved the drone. Nova had said they were birds. He saw one flying, a small one. Not flying, more like gliding with the storm. The bird dodged and spun away from the debris that were carried by the storm. It was like seeing a bird flying inside a hurricane. He turned and travelled inside the metal track. A woman was there. She was holding the staff. And a large bird with metal arms was pinned into the decking of the vehicle.

‘Yes. See, Darius, it is ok. You are here now.’

The woman was driving the end of the staff against the chain that had entwined the large bird. Shocks and pulses of electricity ran from the end of the staff.

“Stop!” the bird yelled. The bird, the ostrich, had yelled with Brock’s voice. “You’re shocking me!”

The storm tore more metal plates from the track. Then the shield appeared. The same shield that had protected the desert camp of the small girl with the single black tent. The night of his dream, when the warrior woman sat outside wearing heavy gauntlets and her hood raised.

Jazzy didn’t know how long the shield could protect them. The sky outside was a black torrent. A hail of rock and debris beat against the shield on all sides, and it glowed and sparkled where it was struck. She stood now, over the bird brain where he lay with her in this ever-shrinking globe and pondered what she was supposed to do. She had no idea what to do. Big Crunch was right. She had not remembered enough yet. She was going to die. They were going to die.

And then there was movement out beyond in the dark. Jazzy watched as a drone hovered by, fighting through the wind. The drone that the bird brains had been carrying had come to life. She watched as it sped off towards the Central Tower.

Darius turned and dove to the center of the storm. The storm was the most intense around the crashed space station, so he sent the drone there. To the space station. The same one he had seen from his dreams, from his time with Badrik. He knew there should be safety there from the storm. To get inside, out of the storm. The drone plummeted through the swirling sand. He could hear everything loud in his ears, where the wind screamed by and drove the sand to hiss against the metal sphere of the drone. The drone was working, fighting to move through the storm, its hum-groan of servos working against the wind. His vision shook and rattled, blurring at times as he tried to see. And then he flew into calm air. Calmness. He had heard about these things. The eye of the hurricane. The center of the tornado. A small column of calm inside the core of the swirling storm.

There was a figure standing there, outside of the station, with the storm swirling around it and swirling around them. A black metal mannequin with a matte skull watched him with empty eye sockets. Darius moved closer.

“I felt you coming in the storm. Through my storm. What are you?” the skull asked. The words came to him from the wind. The sounds formed out of the ripping and shredding of rock and sand as they screeched and collided in the storm wall around them.

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“I am Darius. I’m here to help the machine.”

“Which machine? All of them? Or some? There are many of one that exist, and not all are aligned.”

“There was a machine. He spoke to me in a dream when they were placing this chip of crystal into me. He showed me the top of the tower. He showed me a tower falling and the garden in the valley dying. He showed me things of hope. He showed me an image of a medic saving a knight.”

“That would be my brother, the fool. He showed me this dream of his, too. He insists we preserved data wrong because our memory and existence is not entirely linear. We preserved non-machine memories erroneously in a non-linear way. He says it is because of this the valley dies and that it is our fault. I say he is wrong, and the creatures are uncontrollable, and they live to destroy. He speaks of things we don’t understand, hope and luck as the creatures continue to destroy the garden. I told him instead of seeking hope and luck, I will kill the creatures and we will try establishing the garden on our own. His essence is behind me, in the fallen docking station. Go. I give you free passage, for you too are a machine like us. Those animals behind you, out there, in my storm, I will kill.”

“You and your brother asked the creatures to help save the garden. You gave them power. The power you gave shattered their minds... You harmed them.”

And Darius let his last words fade away because there was no longer any reason to continue. The storm had ceased. The vortex slowly spun itself out; sand made a hush as it fell to the ground, and heavier items, metal fragments, beams, and large metal gears the size of trucks and cars thunked and whumped into the sand. The air became clear and the wind calm.

Jazzy came out of the storm with her staff shielding just dissolving and walked toward the black metal skeleton.

The drone floated just in front of Jazzy as she strode towards Zern.

“It has been a long time since you came to the cantina that night during the storm,” she said to him. “You call yourself Zern now. You spoke to us through the music in the jukebox. You asked for help. We have never stopped trying to help you, but you have turned some of the machines against us.”

The air around them continued to clear. More sand and particles fell away at a further distance, like a fog clearing.

The small bird glided down from the sky and landed on the sand beside her.

“Flying good. I like flying,” the bird said with Nova’s voice. “Darius, you no longer ask for rope? You know where you are?”

“Yes. I’m ok. Thanks, Nova. Thanks again for everything.”

“Humph. Of course. We friends, you know?”

“Ya. I know. Thanks.”

Through the fog, behind Zern, a figure was coming towards them from the direction of the dome—a green-hued droid, one Cyclops eye high in its forehead.

It began speaking to them as it closed the distance. “You all have an apology directly from my brother. He cannot speak right now. He needs ambient sounds to generate and manipulate a voice from, and in acquiescence, he has let his storm die away. He acknowledges you, lady, and he asks if it is true of what the young man’s mind in the drone speaks of. And my response is, yes, brother Zern. He speaks the truth. We harmed them. You harmed them that night you sought out help for us.”

“Yes,” Jazzy said. “I carried a book of sketches and items. I never left friends who knew my past and could remind me to try and hold on to my memories.” She pulled the playing card from her pocket, turned it, and showed him what was scratched there.

“’The Staff Is Yours.’ This is a card from that night you came. It is all that I have left. The bird brain that night, you healed him when he tried to kill you. Whatever you did, you repaired his addled brain, and you gave him back his memories—allowed him to remember the deceit of his closest friend. That feeling of deceit has driven him to persecute all things of technology. The others, like myself, you put on a path of commitment. We moved to try to make things better, what you asked of us that night, but you also made it so difficult. Your touch shattered some of us. You shattered my very existence. We do not remember and think in the same way you do.”

Jazzy reached into a deep pocket and pulled out a rusty metal pipe, short and capped on both ends from inside. “The big lizard man gave this to you that night.”

The black skeleton reached out a hand and took the metal pipe. It had no difficulty turning the nearly fused rusted cap on the end and letting the cap drop into the sand. It tipped the pipe and into its open palm slid a cigar.