Two and a half years had already passed since then. Two and a half years in which everything had remained as that day.

Brun had fallen asleep in a kind of trance, suspended in a strange mattress of space nebulae that stretched into every corner of the operating room, a mass of condensed air, the spectral stuffing of a cryogenic chamber. A room that, with its doors open, displayed its only occupant for anyone passing through the corridor to see, as if it were an experiment in a student science fair. The snapshot of a destroyed operating room and who destroyed it, frozen in time.

The Totem, with the last dose of the Primary Plasma inside of it, had also been trapped there, in that purple cloud, at the other end of the room.

How many times had Broga returned to the bunker since then to see if there had been a change in the situation? He’d already lost count.

How many attempts to enter the operating room had he had? Thirty? Fifty? None of them had turned out to be satisfactory; all had ended with his circuits burned or with the complete or partial destruction of one of his limbs, the first thing that came into contact with that space cloud.

Then, forced to stay in the corridor and careful not to set foot inside the room, Broga had tried to strike up a conversation with Brun to get him to react. Although, of course, in the state that his brother was in, he would have had better luck talking to the wall.

Standing in front of that scene, how many times had Broga turned the situation around in his head trying to figure out where his mistake had been, what calculation had he done wrong. He’d already lost count of that, too.

That knowledge had always eluded him, even more so when his guilt had been as difficult to remove as his hurt pride.

Clemente.

But that day, after two and a half years, the situation had changed.

The double doors of the operating room, which had been left open by that strange energy, had now closed again. Broga pushed one of its leaves—the grinding was chilling—and, from the entrance, looked into the room as he had done so many times before.

Everything looked so clean now. Where that dense cloud had been full of specks of light, there was nothing but darkness. Where his twin had been suspended in the air, there was nothing but emptiness. Where those gruesome marks of blood and disintegrated entrails had been, what was left of his team of doctors, what was left of Clemente, there was nothing but cleanliness.

He analyzed what was ahead with the help of his helmet sensors. Nothing indicated danger. He fired an energy beam into the room, and the beam, instead of being devoured by the nebula as it had been the previous times, followed its course and pierced the back wall, causing it to spit out remains of laminated plates and some rubble on the floor.

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Indeed, everything was gone from the operating room: material things, the Totem, the last dose of Primary Plasma, and even his brother.

The Army was the new owner of the secrets that had slept in the bunker. But what about his brother? If the military had looted the site, it was because Brun had left there before they arrived, otherwise, they would never have been able to enter that room.

So where had Brun gotten to?

‘Well, y’know, it was the Seeker,’ his brother Brun had said in that kind of dream. ‘My foot got tangled in his tail and now it’s dragging me toward him.’

“The Seeker…” Broga whispered. “Computer, details of the spectrometer,” he then asked.

“Radioactive displacement, followed by a Radioactive Void.” His helmet’s computer confirmed what he already knew.

Was Sebastian aware of this? No. If that had been the case, Sebastian would have contacted him by now. He had to let him know. He activated the phone on his wrist and wrote, ‘Sleepwalker’s lost. Castle looted.’ As he feared, though, the message wasn’t sent. The electromagnetic imbalance caused by the discharge that Brun had released then continued messing up radio signals. His four-frequency emitters might be keeping their cybernetic implants going, but there was little they could do to restore communications.

Fine. It was time to move away from there and try again. Sebastian had to know about all of this as soon as possible. And Brun… He had to look for Brun.

He walked away from the operating room when his sensors detected something hidden under one of the corridor doors; something that escaped the human eye and had escaped the drive of the military to put even the smallest crap into their pockets.

He crouched down and, with a magnetic pulsation, drew the object toward his hand.

It was a little silvery piece. The missing piece that completed the puzzle of the break-in into his bunker: the cheek of a metal face, of a Cyclops’ face. From a real Cyclops android. And he didn’t need scans to know who it belonged to. On the chrome surface of the piece, there was a stroke made with a black marker: the android’s drawn mustaches.

“Alfred…” he called him, and once again, memories drove him back.

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“See? That’s better,” Clemente had said one bright morning at breakfast and turned to Broga with an ear-to-ear grin on his face and a black marker in his hand.

One of the female doctors from the team that was present in the room saw what he had just done, and she couldn’t contain the laughter.

Sitting on a surgical table, with a cup of coffee in his hand, Broga looked up. “What have you done to my Cyclops?” he asked and took a sip.

“Giving the poor fella here a personality,” Clemente said and pointed to the android, who had remained still while those cartoonish mustaches were painted on his face. “I was thinking of asking André to reprogram his language patterns; give it an accent, maybe. What do you say, huh, Alfred?” He patted the Cyclops’ cold face and moved his fingers over the painted mustaches as if he had been pulling real mustaches. “Or… Well, I always wanted to have a butler named Alfred, y’know?”

Clemente’s smile, as radiant as his hair and white skin, faded at the end of that memory.

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Contrasting with that morning’s brightness, now in the dark, Broga dropped the found piece, returning it to the floor.

The android Alfred, or what little remained of him, was a declaration that everything that had been there was already part of oblivion.

“You’ve disappointed me,” and suddenly, a woman’s hoarse voice cut off the whistling of the wind.