The Core: The Dark Enemy

51. The Skii's Vigil

"I am going to kill it!" Invicta screamed as she zipped back and forth inside their separate pod.

They had been sealed away for ages, and the little AI was taking her separation from Kevin very badly.

"No, you won't, Invicta. Not if you want to see Kevin again. We have told you this time and time again. If it dies, we are stuck inside this prison forever," Tutor said from her chair against the far wall.

Everyone was handling their time inside the prison differently. Nurse had shared everything she knew, everything the giant Skii had shown her about the future. The Skii itself now sat frozen in his machine, unmoving and unspeaking.

What was it doing? Surviving through disobedience. It wanted to live, and it was avoiding any alternate future where it would die. At this moment, as it had been since it last acknowledged anything, it simply sat frozen, waiting for a timeline that favored its survival.

It had spoken a bit after grabbing Nurse's head and showing her the future, and the things it said barely made sense, at least not to her or the others. It seemed that what the Skii had shown Nurse was very different from what the Skii itself saw.

Something was wrong with it.

Could its mind be broken?

In Nurse's vision, they remained trapped in the time prison for a while before eventually reuniting with Kevin at the end. The details had not been entirely clear, and the memories themselves felt dreamlike and unstable, but one thing remained consistent: they all survived.

She remembered them together again. Hugging, crying, and holding onto one another like people returning from the dead.

The Skii must have seen things very differently, because it kept talking about branches.

In one branch, it never created the time prison, and its creators destroyed it simply because it was an unaccounted mutated offspring. That future, according to the creature, was unacceptable.

Then it spoke about everyone dying. Again and again.

At first the statements sounded random, almost incoherent, until George finally had an idea. Using scraps of information gathered from the Skii's fragmented explanations, he began mapping each mentioned death onto a timeline across one of the pod walls. Every scenario the creature described became another branch line on the growing chart, each one ending abruptly in red marks denoting termination points.

The gaps between them were impossible to calculate accurately. None of them knew how much time separated one failed branch from another. Hours? Years? Centuries?

The only thing that mattered was the final branch: the one where the Skii had marked itself as alive.

So they waited. Because according to the creature, eventually it would reach that branch. And according to Nurse, when it did, they would see Kevin again.

This was where the Skii disagreed.

Whenever Nurse tried to question it further, the massive being only repeated the same thing over and over in different ways, its frozen form staring endlessly ahead while its machine remained locked in suspended operation.

"Kevin does not survive."

Or sometimes:

"The branch where he remains is chopped away."

At first, everyone interpreted that as death. But the more the Skii spoke, the less certain that explanation became. The creature never described Kevin dying the same way it described everyone else dying. Whenever it spoke of death branches, it did so plainly and directly, marking them with certainty and finality.