Chapter III: Chronicle

The two carried their prize down the dirt way, moving with deliberate pace as Night and Omega carrying their rudimentary frame in brisk pace as the sun began to rise and as Night succumbed increasingly toward exhaustion. They soon reach a stream to which Night stopped panting. “Alright, I think we need a break.” She looked at Omega whom seemed to be none at all tired...perhaps as a machine he didn’t have the disadvantage of bodily fatigue but complied to let her rest as they lowered their burden and she knelt by the water to scoop up a handful and lapped casually at her liquid refreshment. Omega sat by the brook, listening as the early morning music of the forest comes alive, the breeze gently whispering through the leaves to produce its calming crescendo. The distant sound of birds chirping as they awake from slumber as the tapping of a woodpecker pounding away to its plunder. It was a more different, a more simpler and more quieter place than back home.
Night finished and sat down beside her companion as they watched the sun rise.
“I think this is a good spot to set camp.” She said contently and wearily, tired from the nights hunt and the excitement of Omega’s unanticipated arrival.
“Camp? But its daybreak, I’m sure we don’t have that much further to go.” Said Omega
“Well it’s nearly twenty miles from where I live and I’m more of a nocturnal hunter anyway so I sleep during the morning. You can make some breakfast with some of the deer meat while I sleep.” She said sleepily as she began to yawn, displaying her beautifully white teeth before closing back with slightly watery eyes from her drowsy expression and soon after curled up and fell asleep.
Hours later, she awoke to the sound of cooking meat and the crackling of fire. Opening her eyes she to an incredible display. All the while she was napping; Omega had somehow rigged together a rudimentary water wheel from sticks and wood which turned in the creek. Whereby from some flexible bark and vines had fashioned a belt to turn a rotisserie with the deer meat sizzling on the large frame of wood as it revolved. Night looked at it with amazement.
“H...how long was I asleep?” she asked as she rubbed her eyes.
“Two hours, fifteen minutes aaaand... eleven seconds.” Omega stated as he summoned up his internal chronometer whilst he analyzed the progress of the cooking meat.
“And how long did it take you to make this?” Said Night as she gazed at the marvelous contraption before her.
“Five minutes, plenty at hand to make a simple rotisserie, it’s been cooking for the past two hours, give or take ten minutes to rig it and season the meat with the forest herbs I found. It’ll take approximately seventeen more minutes before its thoroughly cooked. In the meantime we can talk to pass the time, catch up in our goings on.”
Night nodded as she once again gaped wide her jaws in a yawn before she looked at Omega with a tired smile. “Fair enough, now that I think about it, we never got around to hearing your story. Knowing you, I’d presume you’ve led an interesting life these past ten years.”
Omega gave a contemplative stare toward the dancing flames as though whatever it was...there appeared to be a vast and complex history and perhaps his story would be longer than she’d bargain for.
“I don’t believe I’ve been entirely honest with you and I’m a rather embarrassed to say but...well to put into perspective it has indeed been ten years for you...but for me...it’s been well over seventy years.”
Night looked at him vacantly, taken aback with what he’d just stated as she looked at him.
“Um...did I hear you right...you said...seventy? You don’t mean... seventeen don’t you?” said Night whom couldn’t even think that he was seventy, he looked far too young.
“No, you’ve heard me accurately, it has been seventy years. It’s important to take essence of the fact to emphasize I’m not only an alien from some outlying planet, but from another universe with its own flow of time and space which moves at a much swifter rate than this temporal plane. And I am far older than seventy, in fact, I had been in operation for sixty-two years prior to the day we first met. Now that with seventy years had gone by since then, I am now one hundred and thirty nine years in my operational program.”
She looked at him as she shook her head in shock of the staggering age difference.
“One hundred and thirty....One hundred and thirty nine years old? How? You should be old and you haven’t aged a day...how...?!”
“I am a machine Night, my anatomy is nothing at all like yours. I’m a synthetic lifeform who only wears the façade of your lot. For with the nature of our synthetic condition, we do not age, and we do not operate in the same manner as organics.” Night stared at Omega is disbelief and bewilderment as she tried to digest this truth though to be honest she had a feeling something was different about them besides him being alien. With the truth casting an overwhelming reality, she found it difficult for her mind to grasp. “I know, hard to believe. My only regret was that I assumed you knew how different we are, taking for granted your naiveté and ignorance to the universe. I didn’t think it really mattered.
Night looked to the ground in silence.
“It didn’t matter? Omega, One hundred and thirty nine years old and you haven’t changed a day and that doesn’t even matter? So if it had been twenty..thirty...fifty years and you’d still look no different...I’d be old. Would you love me then?” She pause, trying to choke back the overwhelming sense of her own mortality. “And if it had been a hundred years and I’d be dead, you’d still be here, you’ll stay behind...” a tear ran past her cheek as the harsh reality of her existence, and by comparison how fleetingly brief it would be. “Can...can you even die?” she whispered, hoping that there was some finality in his existence as he seemed to lord over.
Omega looked at her candidly, knowing how much the inevitable truth would hurt her.
“I can’t exactly say that I can die...because by your standards...I never even lived.”
Night looked at him and shook her head, wide eyed in cold disbelief as she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“But...how? You eat...you talk...you reason!” she shouted as she held him by his shoulders in tears. “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST DIE LIKE THE REST OF US?!” she screamed...only to find herself a moment later feeling horrible guilt. “Omega wait...I...I didn’t mean...”
Omega looked at her face in disgust. “I thought you couldn’t surprise me...but how quick you are to judge me and cast the first stone...just like the people who judged you, well bravo.” Said a vexed Omega in disappointment.
“No Omega wait... I didn’t mean that! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”
“So, you want to know the grand mystical secret as to why I’ve been around so long, why I don’t die? Maybe it’s because I am the tin woodsman denied of a heart, a real beating heart! I was created with a mind a mechanical mind! A mind of a puppeteer to move this body, devoid of the warm mortality you all have! This body is just a device to transmit and receive information! The true me is nothing more than an electronic ghost in a shell, an A.I., a computer that controls this body much like how a child controls a toy! So now you know that I am the unfortunate one because I have no mind to make up any real, true thought other than what I am programmed with, I have no heart in order to love, to hate, to laugh and cry with. I have no soul that I may see into eternity; where there is neither a place in Heaven or Hell for me. So tell me, have I satisfied your curiosity or need I list the innumerable things you take for granted?!”
She stared at him as if she was dead, looking for the first time at the true face of her benefactor...a ghost in a hollow shell...no...Not even that really. Like he said before, he has no soul to even have a ghost so he was just an empty shell that by unseen drivers that were controlling it, yet it had saved her and it had done more for her than anything that ever lived. It was ironic, everyone treated her like she was nothing and it was in fact nothing that had saved her.
“I wish...I knew what to think.” She whimpered. “I wish that somehow, under that mask I could feel that I could understand you. That my mind, my limited mind is inadequate to comprehend, to grasp what you are. I know that I’m still young, yet I can’t help but feel that there wouldn’t be enough years in my life to even begin to imagine or understand you..”

Omega looked at her. “I wish I put into words to make you understand, but it would only hurt you more. I feel that if I tell you more, it would only drive a wedge between us. I don’t want that, not for you, not for either of us. Because in a way, it would hurt me just as much. The irony is that before I really had little feeling at all. And now, after all this time, I found I am slowly I begin to feel, at the moment I feel alone.”
Night looked to Omega inquiringly. “But you’re here now, why would you feel alone?”
Omega looked at her, feigning to find a way to articulate an answer she’d be able to digest.
“Because I would continue to live on while those who live in the flesh must inevitably fade away. I didn’t feel that way before when we met. I didn’t understand at the time about relationships until something happened to me, an event that made me reconsider everything I had done and I became aware of how many relationships I had with others I had left behind.”
Night sat on the ground looking at Omega as her wings gently covered her in the chill of the morning air. She was slowly taking in the information, trying for a moment to imagine what it would be like, only to fail. Perhaps for him, it was the same wondering what it was like to feel, truly feel.
“So how did you get these emotions programmed into you?” Asked Night curiously, tilting her head like any housedog in any given inquisitive gesture.
“I take that back, I think the term “programmed” is too indistinct, let me rephrase that. It was more of a side effect from my having merged with a human, which at the time was more for mutual survival than anything else. Seventy years ago, my world was in the midst of a conflict between my race and the humans. Though in those days, the first Lhi’aan, what you may call my eldest brother, murdered our creator and sealed me and my ten other siblings in individual cryogenic pods to which we were frozen and locked away and sent into the most inhospitable areas on the planet. After that, he had made himself the undisputed system administrator of the Lhi’aan race and soon to be conquer of the world. His hatred mechanisms against organic life in addition to his insatiable hunger for power had lead to blood-lusting slaughter that had a headcount up into the millions. And though in that dark time, there was hope. One survivor was a boy named Danos Nord who grew up to be a powerful warrior, fighting the corrupted Lhi’aans that took the world by storm. Danos had gain notorious reputation due to his brutality and was well feared by both Lhi’aans and humans alike. On the day we met, his ship was shot down into the midst of a scorching desert, only he and the pilot survived and he set off, much to the warning of his pilot, to search for water. I am not a believer in fate, but the odds that he found me were too much to ignore that there was some guidance somewhere, because he found my pod where he was digging for water. He was near death when I found him after I thawed out and re-activated and he would have succumbed to the heat, had I not intervened. I did something that was new for me; I injected a part of myself into him, attempting to regenerate him to which I realized later the implications of this merger. We bonded, finding that he and I had a mutual goal, killing the Lhi’aan that started this war and taking away the people we both held dear. So we separated with a plan in mind, he goes to rally his forces, I go to find my siblings, we comingle, raid the island and ensue in one of the bloodiest battles mankind had ever waged. While the bulk of the human forces were engaged with the Lhi’aans, Danos, my siblings and I make our way into the tower where we were made and once there we found the one who killed our creator, imprisoned my siblings and I, and started this terrible genocide of mankind along with Danos’s parents. Alpha, the first Lhi’aan had much in common with the beast, both killers and yet when either they get tired or threatened they hide away, leaving the devastation in its wake. But take away the curtain and seen in a different light, he, like the Beast was revealed to be nothing more than a vain coward hiding in the shadows. And like that creature, he pleaded for his life but was deemed too dangerous to continue existence, so to that end we did the only execution of a Lhi’aan we deleted him but it came with a price, it had a contingency algorithm activated the Mass Singularity Deactivation Contingency. In essence, if one Lhi’aan is shut off, all Lhi’aans shut off, a safety mechanism which keeps us from killing one another and thus keeping the balance of power, something Alpha knew and feared would happen, thus why he locked us in cryo-pods. Anyhow, Danos, to whom I entrusted my knowledge with our codes, accessed the termination program and having done so deleted Alpha, removing his existence from the Terminal. We had also agreed on that once we were all shut down, we would remain so until such a time that the world would be ready for us.”

Night looked at Omega much like a child who was slightly upset with the cliffhanger...
“So that’s it? I mean, how is it you’re here?”
Omega gave her an impish grin.
“That’s another story I’ll tell later, something for you to look forward to, besides, breakfast is ready.”


Night -  Nightwolf1513
Omega  niverian77