this impossible thousand years

“We have inputted the new technology onto Trading Base 5,” reports a man from lips that aren’t hers, yet with eyes she sees out of. Again, she is staring at a monitor, but this time overlooking a familiar base. “A non-CAPS affiliated ship is approaching.”

And the moment the ship got too close to the trading base, a laser beam was fired, hitting the hull and setting the ship aflame. A heavy silence seemed to descend upon the man. “Malfunction, sir. Did -” the man seemed to momentarily chew on his lip. “Were the full safety procedures not carried out for this project?”

~*~

Year 144

There were men, cyborgs and kalons that stared at Zeillese strangely. Their looks were unsettling to her, but she knew, young and with her black titanium limbs only just put in, that most never said anything. CAPS pushed a tolerant mindset, for the rehabilitation and advancement of disabled people and acceptance for all. They offered free gender-changing surgeries to those that felt that they didn’t fit in as they were, and had a strong presence in criminal reform, helping those who had wronged to begin to make the right decisions. If Zeillese had ever asked, they would probably gladly attempt to remove her Riwohr genes; it was, after all, one thing to merely be born paralyzed, and another to hold the enemies’ genes in you. Genes that never before produced any kind of rebel from the species -- likely because both of being raised with a conservative mindset and the fact that biologically, physically, and even in an abstract sort of sense of “magically”, they were different from all the other races of the universe.

And yet, among the people of the CAPS, Zeillese knew there were many men who were worse than them. They had joined the organization only to manipulate the tools of war. They overlooked the foremost importance of the organization; their presence had shortened their name from the full, the Cyborg Affiliation for the Progression of Science and Rehabilitation and Growth of Disabled Individuals (CAPS-RDGI) to merely the first four letters. Some claim it doesn’t really matter, but Zeillese has always loved the good cyborgs had done, and always wanted to view that first rather than the ambiguous view of what science could entail.

Once, Zeillese had been quietly wandering the halls, with a simple missive of curiosity that came with her new security permit. Zeillese was always careful of her curiosity; she feared, at times, it would not end well, and had adapted to sneaking about. It was silly, and sort of childish, not something she would do today. But she was merely a young, newly minted military recruit, barely a teenager.

That day, she heard arguing. Strained syllables and sharp words, the kind that burn in the back of your head and are too loud, too viciously pronounced. It reminded her, in a striking moment, of her father, and the faint, screeching words she could still remember at the fragile age of six months, when he had realized her slow growth was because she was paralyzed.

“Leave her out for the test, see if she survives! Only a Riwohr that can live alone here can be any daughter of mine.” Survival of the fittest, her mother had growled angrily, bitterly.

All Zeillese remembers being told was that a kalon with the same green as her pelt had left her at a cyborg pickup, one for supplies and wounded individuals. She wonders if that had been her mother. She desperately wishes it was - the cyborgs had assumed that was so, but you could never be sure. She also knows she is likely dead; kalons don’t live as long as the prolonged lifespans of cyborgs or the infinite ones of aliens.

It fills her with both hope and sorrow at the same time. Perhaps she had never been “alone” per se. The caps caretakers were good enough. But the closest thing Zeillese had ever really viewed to a parent figure was Mr. Burrison, and sometimes, she, like any other child, wished for something more.

The yells still echoed in the hallway, and with that frenzied recollection of memory, she felt empowered to approach and to hear what was going on. There was hate, too, among that sorrow, towards her father. It would dwell there for a long time.

“B-52 --” that was a strange name; few chose to keep their base assigned cyborg number, “have you considered before the dangers of not thoroughly testing your technology? CAPS may not have set-in-stone regulations about it, but you can’t just rely on your supposed ‘knowledge’ that it’s going to work out fine! Saving money isn’t the biggest of our problems here.”

“Well, considering the difficulty of defeating the Riwohrs, I doubt anyone would want to put a cap on what we can’t and can do. You already have thorough safety regulations for everything else. Leave weapon technology to us.”

Zeillese had, at that age, never really thought anything about long and detailed fine print at the back of her textbooks regarding science, invention and military regulations. It seemed confusing to her as to why they wouldn’t have ‘safety regulations’ for all of their technology. Wasn't it important?

“I know what you’re developing,” the other voice threatened, “reactive weapons for shielding tech? Really? It sounds like a good idea in theory, but I doubt that would get past Riwohr ships.”

“You aren’t even trying to win this war,” B-52 accused, at last, and Zeillese snuck back down the hall, till the voices faded back down to the quiet of the halls at night. Her pelt spritzed with color in agitation, with the high voices churning like floodwaters in her head, and the confusing ‘politics’ messing with her mind.

“Whatever,” Zeillese muttered in her head. As a teenager, fear wasn’t quite as forefront as it had been as a child, but a lack of care was. That feeling would last a long time, perhaps because she couldn’t do anything better at the time. “I’ll just forget about it.”

~*~

Year 417

It was a universal tenet that what you say that you’ll forget, you end up remembering. Zeillese had a great collection of many a secret in her head that she chose to keep to herself, to keep quiet because politics were stupid, didn’t make any sense and wasn’t worth her time. But like all little secrets, they gnawed like immortal worms at the lining of her heart, and left regret in the pores of Zeillese’s skin, through all of her years of indifference.

Breaking out of those piles of regret and inaction was hard.

But it was possible. And Zeillese knew she had seen the future, and she knew what she had heard from the past, and she knew that if she didn’t do anything in some way, she would end up on this crumbling ship again, facing her father with a kind of resignation to death that Zeillese never wanted to have again.

It’s amazing, the kind of motivation a fear of premature death can bring you. Injustice, when it pounds directly like a hammer on Zeillese’s heart, or anyone’s, for that matter, has a way of spurring them into action. They were among Zeillese’s few core values: a great value to life, a hate for her father, and, underneath it all and layered under the banner of “life”, a love for those similar to herself, born imperfect, and striving towards better than their fate had written for them.

So, Zeillese writes a forged report, copying the handwriting of the files she had gone through for years as a basic worker, and slips it under the head coordinator’s doorstep. The report she wrote details the problems experienced from the shielding technology, such as sudden blasts of firepower when unidentified objects get near. It was a lie in this timeline, but all it would take was a test to prove her hidden point.