this impossible thousand years

Year 404

Her promotion came in the same swoop when she signed to agree to technological improvements. Those kind of forms were sent in every fifty years; you could either list an improvement you would want or have the scientists pick out something for you.

Zeillese hadn’t sent in a form, ever; she had only taken the standard military upgrade. But there was something bugging her in the back of her mind.

The way her fur sometimes spritzed, and stuttered in image. Galaxies were in her fur, and sometimes, her image shifted in a way that others would lose sight of her, and she’d suddenly be a few steps away.

Shouts of alarm -- suspicious glares -- curious eyes; the way her pelt shifted was too similar, if diluted, to the way Riwohrs could move through walls and change color and image at will.

Zeillese at times, scared herself, as a child; scrambling under the table and disappearing, before coming back into sight at her teacher’s shout.

The camouflage military survey robots that Zeillese knew of could turn invisible; they fascinated Zeillese as something the same as her, that she would run after with her green plastic limbs and galaxies in her fur. Yet, her paws always held those crystal aether-like teardrops; her fur, sketches of circuits and the static-y image of scales. Not the same way the robots disappeared completely and with a blink. No, Zeillese phased out of the world like a ghost, but always left traces. Most of the time, she was a mess of color, of constellations, and eventually others began to slowly ignore the glitch in their system.

It terrified Zeillese the same way she had seen in the fear in other young kalons’ eyes through the doors of Cyborg Surgery, when they realized their terribly burned paw would never work again, the way that they had thought it always should.

Zeillese thought, when they came out with their new metal paw, that they looked different. In her wide, young eyes, Zeillese knew their lives could have gone two different ways: a life of shame and disability, with the use of only one arm, or one of glory, perhaps, with the flashiness of their high-tech, amazingly different hand.

Zeillese shied away from getting herself fixed for years, because she had already been fixed. She didn’t need to be fixed again, she thought.

She was afraid, perhaps, of that concept of glory. Zeillese was not disabled; merely strange, and to not be strange felt like she would no longer be herself, in all of her child irrationality.

Zeillese stood at the kind of point in her life devoid of that child irrationality; in fact, Zeillese would say she was devoid of merely anything at all for years, staring at the same shimmering image in the mirror.

There was a nudge though, a change in the air. A nudging in the back of her mind of a crumbling ship. Invisibility was a kind of military trait that would be useful, and in that moment, Zeillese wanted to make herself useful: for all she felt like nothing much at all in those years, and for all she cared little, she wanted… she wanted that same fire that other girl that was her had in her imagination.

She requested this, and the cyborg scientists worked their magic.

Zeillese’s nickname had always been some variation of Zeil; as a child, her friends called to her from down the halls with that name. Sometimes, it sounded like Veil -- no-one really noticed until she could actually control her color shifting, and become invisible at the flip of a switch.

She herself didn’t know much about it, but apparently the scientists had activated a dormant gene and connected to hardware implanted in her legs, derived from the military invisibility function on robots. However, it was still slightly different; it was like invisibility, and more like disappearing into the shadows: fading to black.

Zeillese thought, afterwards, her child self had a reason to be afraid.

It was strange, to suddenly be honored and respected, for merely the magic of your veins, and a simple change with technology.

~*~

She looked through the eyes of someone made of all metal.

They fiddled with the buttons on the dashboard, came up with an overview of empty space, for thousands of miles in this quadrant of the galaxy.

A Riwohr ship phased through the haze of the stars, flexible and alive and the same as the space around it, like all were. Burning spheres of pure energy appeared at its jaws and blasted forth.

Those biological eyes set into metal widened, slammed on controls frantically, and died in a brilliant flash of light.

The space was empty, with one ship, once again.

~*~

Zeillese woke with her strange stone in hand again.

All she knew of that stone is that it was the only thing with her when she awoke.

~*~

Zeillese upgraded from office and teaching jobs to 24/7 scouting work.

It’s two days after that second strange dream, and Zeillese is on a planet some thousand light-years away from CAPS headquarters. She wears a simple black raincoat, for all she hates that kind of wear, it covers her more impressive traits. But at least under the hood, she looks more like a simple kalon.

She scowls.

But there’s no time for that, because Zeillese can feel a worried undercurrent to the air. She hears, in fragments, “Destroyed… outpost ship… caps.” Zeillese knew that if there had been anything left in remnants, or any sort of alert, the headquarters should know a ship was taken out.

But what if it was destroyed in a second?

Riwohrs had that sort of power. Zeillese faded into the shadows, and hurried her way off the planet.

What if that dream was more than a dream?