this impossible thousand years

The lights stuttered, transforming the walls to a blink of white and black; the ship groaned, one great, longing ache that bloomed from the depths of the engines themselves. Zeillese did not know that groan: had never longed to know it. Rather, she had feared it, like every child who grew up upon these great steel ships, forged from the strongest materials, and engineered by the most brilliant of minds in the universe, the cyborgs.

Everyone knew this, but Zeillese knew it intimately: in her legs of black titanium, fueled by aether, a substance that shone bright, neon blue, unflattering as the species it fueled. She was a cyborg; those legs let her walk. The mechanical spine along her tail let her balance, and the connectors all through her body up to her ears fit it all together, as if she had never been broken at all.

Zeillese looked through her eyes; really looked through them, orange irises and black sclera; and realised she couldn’t move, that this - for all it seemed to be - was not her body. It was like a rolling script of film; the ship, breaking down around her; her feet, planted firmly, threateningly on the ground, her teeth bared in a snarl. Above the clamor of the end of the world, with her pulse pounding in her ears, she saw a dark smudge that slowly grew into focus: a Riwohr, that she knew with startlingly clarity, was her father. She knew this in the way she knew her blood was a vibrant orange, in the way her long whiskers fanned out in the same way as her father’s winding, shadowy limbs, in the way her pelt shifted like it had a burning, green galaxy within it, the same way her father came in and out of focus, and seemed to have unspeakable depths to his skin. His eyes were pin pricks, deep set in the shadowy void of a body, with the only clear points of focus to be the trio of appendages at the alien’s tail, tipped bright orange, the same as his, and her, blood. His voice was a chatter that Zeillese shouldn’t be able to understand if she was the same as everyone else; a piercing sound that was pitched above all sound, as if it was greater: as if deserved to be heard, but only by the greatest of beings, and only by itself.

He said, each with high, painstakingly pitched syllables, “So you end like this, Zeillese.” As if he had the right to know her name, to utter it in the forsaken language. “As a mistake,” he continued, bitterly.

Zeillese was suddenly struck out of her imprudence by fear. A disastrous, growing beast, stemming from her limbs, which remained frozen, as if this otherworldly Zeillese was already resigned to this fate. As her father grew in clarity, the atmosphere around her grew heavier and heavier, like the most terrible of her nightmares, the kind where he would split his jaws open and swallow her whole, like the most primitive of beasts. This moment felt like the end of her life, one come far too early. And for all it appeared to be, it was.

“A mistake,” he repeated, sharp, screeching. “To have you ever born, to have you join this failure of an organization. It is overdue you serve your fate, after all of these hundreds of years of running from it.”

“Who do you think you are?” Her lips spat, but it was not Zeillese speaking; it was some other, her, “to deem what fate is or isn’t? This life is - was, my destiny; my mother chose to let me live. Chose to not just throw me out the door because I was born paralyzed; chose to give me a chance, unlike you and your stupid alien ideologies don’t give me. You just want to control people, to control the universe; and you’ll only take something that is born and made the same as the rest of it. It’s a narrow minded way to think; have you ever wondered, of what good this place has done for people, for- for me?”

Her father seemed to phase through space and time, a shadowy menace made of the same fabric of the universe itself. “Have you wondered of what bad it has done? Riwohrs such as me, and our planets, have been destroyed to your race’s meddling. It is time you understand that,” that shrill voice seemed to whisper in her steel-plated ears, echoing off the walls, down the halls, and burning like feverish fire at the back of her head.

~*~

Year 354

Zeillese bolted upright, the sudden jolt straining her wires and sending an electric shock down to her toes. She shivered, violently in the way it sparked along the sweat on her limbs. She was too cold and too hot; her heart pounded, and her throat was full of rocks. She couldn’t breathe.

Stumbling out of bed, she planted her hands against the wall and took in deep breaths, wishing desperately for the dreadful feeling in her chest to go away. It hadn’t, but at least she could breathe. Her gaze wandered to the ground, and she realized she had been holding something in her sleep: that strange rock that was never quite black, and seemed to shift in her hand at times, like a physical ghost. Zeillese didn’t remember grabbing it before going to bed that night.

Curiously, she picked it up, and watched the way it seemed to nearly melt into her hand, yet kept a rock-like form. With one last glance, she placed it by her bedside table and got ready for the day.

Her work suit was sharp and simple; Zeillese was careful to always keep it well pressed and without creases. Briefly, she ran a comb through her orange tresses, making sure it was straight, not a hair out of line. She looked at herself both ways in the mirror; her four ears framed her face nicely. She looked as well as always, she would say to herself. For a moment, she touched the orange scales on her cheek, and felt their pearly hardness in contrast to her short, soft green fur.

She remembered, momentarily, the feeling of trying to scrape those scales off her skin, as if they were a plague. But they always grew back, as sure an existence as the orange of her blood, like a poison she had been cursed with. They grew over and between the space of her wiring when she slept. The technicians looked at it like a fungus when her joints had troubles, whispered reassuringly, “We’ll fix you right up,” and got out an assortment of sharp, metal instruments - pointy scissors and gleaming knives - and peeled them off like stubborn stickers.

Caught in the memory, she met eyes with herself in the mirror: she looked defeated, lost to bearing this mark on her skin. That’s me, Zeillese thought, I look perfect in every way but the things I can’t change.

~*~

The Cyborg Affiliation for the Progression of Science Headquarters (CAPS, for short), moved quickly and without any relent; Zeillese had grown up here, and now she worked as a full-fledged cyborg towards the war effort. Unlike most cyborgs, she did not choose to pursue science. Instead, she had studied history and military strategy. It was a choice that didn’t go unnoticed by some; a pull towards the leadership sect, and more subtly, a look into herself. Introspection was often something ignored by “caps”. Many had disabilities and did not like to look back at it, but rather work forward by scientifically changing those traits by becoming cyborgs. Zeillese thinks, at times, she was expected to work towards removing her scales and shifting pelt and whiskers through science, because she hated the aliens - the Riwohrs - just like the rest of them.

Zeillese did. She hated them. She just hated them enough to choose to attack them foremost at the source, rather than trying to change herself.

At least, that was what Zeillese hoped to do one day, if she could say she had any hopes at all at this point of her life. Her job was monotonous, taking her day down the same path every day: check in to the command board to sort early morning reports, train recruits in the afternoon, and perhaps in the evening she would either head out on a basic scouting task, often at the same areas, or go back and return to sorting reports and files.

Each day was typically the same, a page in a book repeated two hundred times. No-one minded her because nothing happened to her, and she barely minded herself. It was the kind of routine that dulled your mind and chipped away at the will of your soul.

Something was different about today, though. It was as if her dream was an earthquake on her life, displacing everything, from her memories to the way she flipped the pages of her files, her black claws carefully clipping the edges. When she looked at a new recruit, with a mechanical leg newly put in, she could see herself.

“Young, 7 months old, half-kalon, half-Riwohr,” was the whisper of the scientists, “paralyzed, waist-down, due to false genetic lineup. She’s going to need new legs and a lower spine; connectors to the brain, too.”

That memory of pain, entrenched into her brain, as her new lower body was connected to her brain. The hottest flame, blue - no, green, searing at the very back - the sides - no, everywhere in her brain, and suddenly that feeling, for the first time, of a whole body, four legs and all. Her limbs for her legs had been a child’s bright green plastic, like a toy attached by the hip.

The new recruit’s limb was a turquoise, less clunky, and full of more aether. Zeillese could see the bright blue shining through.

Zeillese turned, and was met with the face of her co-worker, who also helped to train the recruits. She had seen him a thousand times by now, but his mechanical, black titanium face and clear, shining projection of the CAPS military symbol greeted her eyes. The aether, and a gear; she had a similar halo on her back, when she had been initialized formally into the military. She had gotten her current black limbs, then, too.

She realized something, then, staring into brilliant blue eyes with one small, round and black static projection in each eye. In that dream… the faintness of color, like smudged, scraped away paint; the aether veins in her legs had been half-empty, hadn’t they?

It was a strange, impossible thing to dream, like nothing she would have ever imagined. Such a thing would mean the fall of an empire…