I, Cassandra

48 | RYAN MADDOX

Another flickering. Another hum. I gain awareness on my back facing a leaden sky thick with dust particles. There is light, which means it must not be winter anymore. I have lost several months at least. The damage I sustained on the way up must have been critical. Yes. It was. It was brutal. But I held on to her pod for longer than I expected.

Blue. I try not to think about it. I lost her somewhere on the way up, right before a shear of bedrock struck me.

I'm so fucked I can't even turn my head. I can only stare at the opaque lid of a dull sky, and wait for the nanobots to rebuild me again. It takes a long time. An entire day and night pass before I have the power to begin my search for Blue—the one I now realise has defined all the shit I've endured, who gave me a reason to go on, despite what I've become, despite the pointlessness of it all.

In the grey light of a shitty, dead dawn, I sit up.

To nothing.

I turn full circle, expecting to find the rift that freed me from the depths with Blue's pod close by. Instead, an undulating wasteland of scoured bedrock confronts me. In the distance, lumpen mounds that I suspect are all that's left of the might of Alpha VII's dome. The view greets me, silent, calm, yet condemning, devoid of both fissures and pods. I blink, unwilling to take in the enormity of it. Of where I am—and Blue isn't. I shove back the image of her pod still beneath the surface, buried alive. My fingers curl into fists. I still have a thousand years to kill, if I have to dig her out with my bare hands, I will.

I turn, because I don't know what else to do, and absorb the bleak vista. I have no idea where I am. The soldier in me tells me I need to get my bearings. Mark this place to at least give myself a starting point in my search for Blue.

I cast around looking for something to mark the spot, but the Greenland I am standing in is nothing like it was before. Though its glaciers were already long gone, there had been a dense furze of pale orange and copper lichen that had gorged on the long-buried nutrients of the ancient bedrock. Without its blanket, the dull grey of the exposed rock peers back at me, naked and vulnerable bearing scorch marks where the densest clumps of lichen burned their imprint into the land. It's depressing so I look away, at the sky which sulks over me heavy with fine debris carried on the jet stream from god only knows where.

So this is it. One thousand years of nothing, and no Blue. I think of the safe, and of my wild race to get it so she would have a little companion to comfort her in this strange new world. But it was a waste of energy. Fake Miro is gone, too. Forever lost. Everything is fucked. Everything. I kick the air and then feel stupid, like I'm a kid taking a tantrum and someone is watching me, judging me. But of course, there is no one. I am the only one left standing. And I'm not even human. The irony is deafening.

Pissed off, I continue to ruminate on the loss of Miro's safe when the memory of seeing de Pommier for the last time pops up. A wrecking ball of hope ploughs into my pissed-off-ness.

I pat my breast pocket, frantic, certain it will be destroyed, shattered into dust, but it's not. I don't waste time thinking about how miraculous it is as I examine the general's last gift to the human race. It's totally intact. For a fleeting moment, I wonder if the nanobots repaired it. I cut off the thought. It doesn't matter. It's whole. I have something from before and a location. With the toe of my boot, I drag a thick line into the dust coating the bedrock. A white scuff emerges, like an open wound in its monotonous grey skin. It's not going to be enough. One downpour and it will be gone. I need something permanent. A primordial primitiveness surrounds me and I realise even with all my enhancements even the most basic task is going to be an enormous challenge.

It takes me a long time to gather up enough rocks to build a substantial mound over my imprint. Most of them I have to prise free from the bedrock, cracked and loosened by the upheavals, but still embedded in the bedrock's face. There's almost nothing lying loose on the ground which I find strange, but don't dwell on it. It feels like my existence now is to deal with a lot of unknowns and I don't like it. I fucking hate it.

Hauling each rock free is a tedious, boring task, and it makes me angry. By the time I am done, I'm claustrophobic with my failure to protect Blue and the possibility I might never find her again, even with a thousand years to burn. For all I know she's been dragged back down into the depths and ended up with all the other pods that fell into the abyss. For all I know, her pod's power source failed and she's already dead from suffocation and everything from this point on is a waste of energy.

I search my memories for something, anything, to explain how I am above ground minus a rift. Maybe I came to and walked here on autopilot, nothing more than a machine with zero awareness. Maybe I got caught in another quake and that's how I ended up on my back needing a full day to rebuild. I search the neat corridors of my memories with care and precision but find nothing except utter darkness, presumably the catalogue of my shutdown—of my near non-existence.

It troubles me, the possibility I could function without my consciousness at the helm, that I am not my own master. The more I resist the thought the more it boomerangs back to torment me. I need to do something. I decide to find the fucking rift.