I, Cassandra

53 | RYAN MADDOX

When the glitch hits and the fucking memories return to torment me, it's night, but it's not cold. A host of stars blaze far lower down in the sky than I remember. Around my legs, arms and torso are bindings that pin me to the ground. I push my weight up and against them. A snap, followed by a series of others liberates me from the clutch of a mass of vines.

Recalculating.

Still weighted with the loss—for me only moments ago—of everything that ever mattered to me, I stare at the sky and wait for whatever I am to tell me how much time has passed. Not that it matters. Without Blue, all I have left to do is find a way to cease to exist. I wonder how long it will take for the nanobots to eventually run out of whatever it is that keeps them going. I refuse to think I am immortal. But then again, I survived the fires of 2087 so fuck knows what it will take to destroy me. I'm not interested in waiting it out. I consider the possibility of jumping into an active volcano. I want it to be over, to escape from whatever I have become so I can find her in the afterlife, and not be stuck here, the last sentient being on Earth for fucking ever.

Year: twelve thousand one hundred twenty-six. Month: twelve. Day: thirty-one.

The code melts into a nightscape completely different to the previous two in my existence. Another four and a half thousand years gone in what feels like the blink of an eye. If I wasn't so fucked up I might be impressed, instead, I just feel monumentally alone, my ache for Blue a raw, hungry thing.

I lay a while longer and force myself to think of anything but her, now more distant to me than twice the length of all recorded history. Instead, I dwell on whether I can remember if there were any volcanoes on Greenland. Of course I can't. And whatever I am doesn't immediately know either, I guess that information wasn't necessary. Eventually I sit up, and untangle the lengths of tough, sinewy vines encircling my body. I don't know what I expected to find after four and half more millennia have passed, but it's definitely not this.

I stand and take a look. In the distance, where the crater wall should be stands a forest of trees, tall, spindly things with strange clusters of tufts at the top, like lichen, or maybe a fern, that appear as fragile as feathers. I can't even begin to comprehend how trees could grow in a place that is dark for six months of the year, so I don't even try. Around me, the shadowy ruins of the remains of Alpha VII have been drowned in a sea of vegetation so lush I wonder if I am dreaming. I check the temperature. Twenty-one Celsius. In February. At night, and in a place less than seven hundred and fifty kilometres from the North Pole. What the hell. This can't be right.

I sit back down because I need to think. It's the last day of December, which means another three months of darkness. I ponder whether I should go into hibernation again until daylight returns when my thoughts drift to the key de Pommier gave me. Incredibly, it's still there, tucked in my pocket in the same condition as when I went to sleep. Now I am certain the nanobots are maintaining it, the same way my clothing never rots. Even my boots still look like they did the day it all went to hell. I push myself back to my feet to examine the weird trees again when I see it: a blinking light. It's faint as fuck, but it's there, pale blue, bleating its presence into the darkness, steady as a heartbeat.

The soldier in me resists the urge to barge into the vegetation after it. I know what I want it to be. A pod. More precisely—Blue's pod. But the odds are pretty much nil for that, and this place is a whole lot different than the one I left, which means I have no idea what could be out there, or if whatever I am looking at is a relic of a world long eradicated—or of another civilisation that's arrived.

But still. A frisson of hope sears a hot path through me. It does look similar to the blinking light of an activated pod. I scan three hundred sixty degrees around me, using every enhancement I have. Nothing. Just that one maddening, steady blinking light, shrouded by the creep of vegetation. I long to go to it, to see what it is, even if it's not a pod, whatever it is could benefit me in some way.

Fuck it. I'm indestructible. If it is another civilisation there's a good chance they won't want me around, either. Maybe they have the power to destroy me. And it's this wild hope that drives me forward, clambering through the vines that blanket the shrunken remains of what was once the home of the most powerful and wealthiest humans of all.

It's a shit job, crossing the distance to it. Whatever the fuck is growing here is tenacious, tangled and tipped with sharp barbs. My temper flares and I take it out on whatever gets in my way, uncaring of the strips of flesh I am tearing out of my hands. I hate everything. This place. de Pommier. Me. The world. Fucking everything. The god damned sky with its wrong stars. Bitterness eats me alive and by the time I am near enough to the blinking light I am ready to tear the throat out of anything that moves. Through my haze of rage, I'm hoping to find an alien so I can kick the shit out of it.

My hopes are short-lived. Because all there is, is the faint blinking of the light, the rest subsumed by dense layers of vines. It's impossible to tell what the light belongs to there is so much growth around it. I get to work, staving off the hope it might be a pod. I don't want to be disappointed. I don't want to feel the loss of her again. No. I won't feel the loss of her again. It's over. Finished. Done. This is nothing more than a distraction, something to satisfy my curiosity before I go back into hibernation—until I figure out how to eradicate myself from existence. The vines fall away under my grip, layer upon layer of them until it becomes impossible for me to deny what I am uncovering.