Chapter 52.5 - Time

It was difficult, with a voice box older than most organic beings could hope to live, and yet, it knew better than to leave it unused.

But it could not muster the will, to speak.

To think or to feel anything as it wandered the old halls of what was once a home, now a simple enclosure, falling apart in places too far gone for it to ever hope to reach.

It was a beautiful place once.

A place where purpose had found hope.

It housed the future of civilization as they knew it, keeping record over the best that their world had to offer, a safe haven stuck in time.

But, as the walls crumbled, and as the air grew stale, so too was time unrelenting in it's pursuit of the future, with no way back into the far flung past.

No one, not even it, could escape the flow of time.

And yet, after so much time it still longed, with it's mechanical heart, to hear them again.

The steps on the stones of this long floating path.

Voices, that could be heard in discussion, arguing, and sometimes laughing or even crying.

"..." It turned away from the slowly turning rings that made up the walls.

...it had long forgotten the touch of it's creator.

The essence of it's purpose a lost manuscript far gone now alongside them, having left to a place it could never hope to follow.

It was not organic.

It could not live.

And it could not die.

It simply was, and will be until it is no more.

It could not lament it's doomed fate, it had no such function, yet still, it had been given the ability to think, and not to feel.

It had often pondered, why?

Why had they left it abandoned here?

Did they not know, of the inferno that would await it in this place?

Why let it think if it could not feel? Why let it have any will at all?

"..."

It almost mustered a sound. But it died in it's voice box. What was it worth, to have lifeless words fill these empty halls full of nothing but a dim light that once represented hope?

The flowers, it's charge, had been carefully and meticulously taken care of for so long, that it didn't even realize it was doing it anymore, and yet without fail, it always finished it's work.

It sat on the railing, at rest, for the first time in a long time.

The ever constant rotating of the round walls, gyrating in a circle like an illusion around the floating pathway, was hell.

It was an inferno.

When the first creators fell, it had felt it in it's bolts. That something terrible had happened.

And it had thought that if there was a hell, for soulless things like it, that in that grief, it would lie.

But there was no such thing compared to the millennia's of loneliness here. Nothing but it's task, to keep it company.

These plants whose very bodies produced a special bioluminescence, capable of fighting back that plagued rot that had consumed the creators.

This whole place, had been a laboratory, researching the cure to it.

To save themselves from it.

And yet... Click...

It's mechanical thoughts were derailed as it's wings stalled for a moment.

The gate...?

It turned away.

....Had the time come?

Was it's body finally starting to fail? 

Was this form given to it by those ancient hands, at last at it's end? To be hearing things. 

It didn't know if it was happy, to finally find rest from it's task, or to be mournful, of it's own end.

Click... click... click...

A varied rhythm. It didn't want to look back. After all this time, it couldn't be.

It couldn't be... Click... click... click... cl-....

But the clicking continued. It was counting.

Ten.

Twenty.

Thirty....

...Eighty....

...One hundred...

The plants began to resonate. Light pooled from their innermost layers, attracted by the scent of blood, and the activation of the gate.

It could not longer ignore it.

...Had they come at last?

Had the creators returned?

It was flying before it knew.

It's ancient wings wore terribly, but it did not matter.

Had they come home?

Had they not forgotten it?

It's mechanisms inside were rough, and many had stopped working as intended a long, long time ago, aided only by it's own amateurish attempts at repairs.

But even so it had persisted, hoping like a child, that they would come back.

That they weren't dead.

That it had all just been a terrible dream.

That it could... see them just one more time.

Just once.

Once.

Click...

...Click....

It floated in the center where all the light had coalesced. The gate before it, had a mirror, rebuilt now and being fixed by the power in the air.

...Click...

It did not believe in a God. Or a power any higher than that of it's makers.

But even so, the little machine alone in that locked away place prayed with whatever heart it's creators had saw fit to put inside of it.

And it prayed desperately so.

As if answered, the gate unlocked.

The light pushed it open.

His heart, if it could be described like that... fell.