Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

1. Tides and Time

As he turned his senses back towards the endless universe, appearing black and empty to his human-like perception, he wished that they could continue like this forever. But the river of time flowed mercilessly, and they still had work to do.

"Perhaps...," he concluded his elaboration, "...that makes it easier to go from asking questions about 'how', to questions about 'why'. And where to go from here."

A hint of a smile seemed to flicker across the Captain's face, then he softly shook his head.

"Well, the immediate answer to that last question is right there," he said and pointed at the distant star. "So let's focus on the mission at hand for now."

"Of course, sir," he agreed.

But for just a little while longer, they both allowed themselves to stand there in silence, and he continued to observe the infinity of space through the eyes of a human, wishing for an infinity of time to match it. But time was running out, and  just like the entropy in the universe increased with every passing second, he knew that chaos was upon them. It would reach them before they would arrive at their destination.

Something unsettling rose within him, like a tugging sensation at the most distant corner of his artificial mind. A force that became stronger and stronger, until the darkness beyond the viewing ports seemed to expand and finally swallowed everything around him.

~ ~ ~

She woke with a groan of pain as the world around her became physical again.

Waking from these dreams was always unpleasant, but recently, she had begun to feel more than the mere physical pain associated with having her mind flung back into her broken body. She sat up on the bed, knowing very well that she would not be able to fall asleep again after this, and realized that her hands were trembling - hands that didn't feel like her hands at all. It was like a perverse kind of phantom pain - not the sensation of pain in a missing part of her body, but the sensation of pain in someone else's body. And yet it was hers.

Even after five years, she still sometimes woke up like this, feeling as if she didn't know herself.

How much of her, herself and her mind, had been sacrificed just to save this body? And for what? All that was left was a shell. A cage that now housed not one, but two very strange creatures that still had to grow accustomed to each other.

The titanium plate covering more than half of her skull, ever since a raider on Thanatos 3 had bashed her head in, seemed to tingle under her scalp this morning. White hair had grown and covered the scars, but the rest of the hair growing on the other half of her head was still black. Riga had forced her to dye everything black to match, but she had stopped when she had left him. The sight of the dark pigments draining out of her hair as she had washed it had satisfied her deeply. She had often wondered why he was so intent on having her hair appear normal, when they had replaced her damaged eye with a pitch black sphere with no discernible iris or pupil. It was not exactly subtle when compared to her organic eye, which was of a pale gray.

Then again, Riga probably had had to make do with whatever he had been able to find after the Purge, on the black markets of remote places like Beryn and the colony on the dark side of Hel. And ultimately, the mix-and-match look she sported now was probably quite fitting for a body that housed more than one mind.

I am sorry, the voice in her mind said,  heavy with remorse. He spoke softly, so unlike Riga had ever addressed her, and his words seemed to immediately soothe the uncomfortable prickling at the back of her head. It was different from the voice he had in the dreams, not at all mechanical. When he spoke to her, he sounded very organic.