this impossible thousand years

It was delightfully simple, with the kind of thrill Zeillese had never experienced before, not as a child, nor a young adult.

Zeillese worked as the Veil, and traveled the universe in shadows.

She dreamt of the future.

She anonymously tipped either for the cyborgs, to win against the aliens, or against; to win against the flaws of themselves.

She searched, relentlessly; in the time between guard shifts on the archives, the current records and in cyborg militant’s offices at the HQ or outposts thousands of miles away.

She learned, she remembered, she theorized, she saved, and Zeillese became confused.

Zeillese had not forgotten the threatening words of her father on the once-future day of her death (she believed, by now, she had hopefully averted her own death). She thought it was perhaps the environmentally damaging effects that had destroyed the alien ship.

But it wasn’t; it couldn’t have been. The emissions of the cyborg technology, as much as their resource harvesting might have damaged some of their host planets, could not have affected the universe so greatly from so far away. The CAPS were not so grand.

~*~

Year 739

Zeillese returns to CAPS HQ for the first time in five months.

“Is that the Veil?” she hears, in murmured whispers from across the hall.

“Who? That’s her? She looks a lot like Zeillese…”

“Zeillese is the Veil, you idiot.” Zeillese turns her head and sees the person who had just spoken: the same recruit she had trained some three hundred years ago, who used to have a turquoise child limb. He was noticeably more cyborg now.

But the other….

~*~

Year 76

“Zeillese?” The whisper came eagerly, clearly altered through a voice changer, jagged and mechanical.

“Who’s asking?” Tough and small to other kids, and admiration for those older than her. But always a bit a fear, for both.

“Just Sixty-Seventy-Two!” Immediately, Zeillese scoffed and turned around, pivoting on her plastic back legs to come to them face-to-face. Zeillese plucked the voice changer device right off their face, revealing a furry gray face with bright blue eyes. “Hey,” they whispered with a toothy grin in response. Their real voice was much softer like this.

“Numbers don’t work like that, y’know!”

“Yeah…”

“It’s read as six hundred seventy two, Seven.” Zeillese was careful to pronounce each syllable, as if she was reading from an invisible number that was hard to crack. Seven smiled in response.

“I thought I was Six yesterday, Zeil!”

“And I thought I told you to call me Zeillese, Six!” Seven mock-gasped in horror.

“Six? What happened to Seven…”

Zeillese flat-lined at that point, throwing up her arms and yelling, “Seven! Seven. Just Seven, since you can’t pick a real name for yourself.”

Seven threw up their arms in reassurance. “Okay, okay, Zeil, it’s Seven --”

“It is Zeil - ese - se!” Seven shuffled nervously for a few moments. Zeillese frowned, and nudged Seven’s shoulder with hers. “Wanna go play a game?”

Seven’s eyes lit up, any worries dispersed by that statement. “Okay! Let’s go! I bet I’ll beat you.”

“Nope!” Zeillese shouted, running down the halls after her wolfish friend.

… was Seven, whom Zeillese knew from her childhood. She cringed at the thought of how loud and brash she had been back then. She’d yell and never even realize she was scaring her friend. Though, in a way, she was evolving back towards that. Had evolved back towards that, in a different way.

“Zeillese?” Seven called, hesitantly. She had always been so much more nervous than her as a child, and yet, had probably turned out braver during her teenage years. To hear her name on Seven’s lips like that was almost as if she had been whisked back to her childhood. She was so old, now, though, in kalon years - perhaps her fifties, or sixties. The lines of age became so blurred under cyborg technology.

Zeillese knew she could have turned and reunited with her first best friend, of centuries prior.

But she chose to merely nod and keep walking. She had a mission to fulfill that couldn’t wait.

Perhaps, throughout the ages, she had also grown cold.