Chapter III: Chronicle

The two carried their prize down the dirt way, moving with deliberate pace as Night and Omega carrying their rudimentary frame in brisk pace as the sun began to rise and as Night succumbed increasingly toward exhaustion. They soon reach a stream to which Night stopped panting.
“Alright, I think we need a break.” She looked at Omega whom seemed to be none at all tired. Perhaps it was in the advantage and oddity of his alien anatomy didn’t have the drawback of bodily fatigue but agreed to let her rest as they lowered their burden and she knelt by the water to scoop up a handful and lapped casually at her liquid refreshment. Omega sat by the brook, listening as the early morning music of the forest comes alive, the breeze gently whispering through the leaves to produce its calming crescendo. The distant sound of birds chirping as they awake from slumber as the tapping of a woodpecker pounding away to its plunder. It was a more different, a more simpler and more quieter place than back home.
Night finished and sat down beside her companion as they watched the sun rise.
“I think this is a good spot to set camp.” She said contently and wearily, tired from the night’s hunt and the excitement of Omega’s unanticipated arrival.
“Camp? But its daybreak, I’m sure we don’t have that much further to go.” Said Omega
“Well it’s nearly twenty miles from where I live and I’m more of a nocturnal hunter anyway so I sleep during the morning. You can make some breakfast with some of the deer meat while I sleep.” She said sleepily as she began to yawn, displaying her beautifully white teeth before closing back with slightly watery eyes from her drowsy expression and soon after curled up and fell asleep.
Sometime later she awoke to the sound and aroma of searing meat on the crackling fire. Opening her eyes she to an incredible display. All the while she was napping; Omega had somehow rigged together a rudimentary water wheel from sticks and wood which turned in the creek. Whereby from some flexible bark and vines had fashioned a belt to turn a rotisserie with the deer meat sizzling on the large frame of wood as it revolved. Night looked at it with amazement.
“H...how long was I asleep?” she asked as she rubbed her eyes.
“Two hours, fifteen minutes aaaand... eleven seconds.” Omega stated as he summoned up his internal chronometer whilst he analyzed the progress of the cooking meat.
“And how long did it take you to make this?” Said Night as she gazed at the marvelous contraption before her.
“Five minutes, plenty at hand to make a simple rotisserie, it’s been cooking for the past two hours, give or take ten minutes to rig it and season the meat with some forest herbs I found. It’ll take approximately seventeen more minutes before its thoroughly cooked. In the meantime we can talk to pass the time, catch up in our goings on.”
Night nodded as she once again gaped wide her jaws in a yawn before she looked at Omega with a tired smile. “Fair enough, now that I think about it, we never got around to hearing your story. Knowing you, I’d presume you’ve led an interesting life these past ten years.”
Omega gave a contemplative stare toward the dancing flames as though whatever it was...there appeared to be a vast and complex history and perhaps his story would be longer than she’d bargain for.
“Well first of all, I think I should put the record straight, I haven’t been entirely honest with you and I’m a rather embarrassed to say but, while it has been ten years for you, it’s been well over seventy years for me.”
Night looked at him vacantly, taken aback with what he’d just stated as she looked at him.
“Um...did I hear you right...you said...seventy? You don’t mean... seventeen don’t you?” said Night whom couldn’t even think that he was seventy, he looked far too young.
“No, you’ve heard me right, seventy years. We should take note of the fact that I’m not only an alien from some outlying system, I am also from another universe that has its own flow of time and space which moves at a much swifter rate than this temporal plane. And as a matter of fact I am far older than seventy; I’ve been in operation for sixty-two years prior to the day we first met. Now that with seventy years had gone by since then, I am now one hundred and thirty nine years in my operational program.”
She was taken aback as she shook her head, trying to wrap her head around the staggering age difference.
“One hundred and thirty....One hundred and thirty nine years old? How? You should be old and you haven’t aged a day...how...?!”
Omega’s ears folded as he lowered his head, he anticipated that there would be some shock, but in his usual fashion, he came prepared.
“Well, I am an artificial lifeform, Night; and as such, my anatomy is nothing at all like yours. You could say that I’m a lifeform who just appears on the surface as a façade of your kind. What’s more in the fundamental nature of our synthetic condition, we simply do not age, nor do we operate in the same manner as you organics.” Night stared at Omega is disbelief and bewilderment as she tried to digest this truth though to be honest she had a feeling something was different about them besides him being alien. With the truth casting an overwhelming reality, she found it difficult for her mind to grasp. “I know, hard to believe and frankly I didn’t anticipate this truth to trigger a shock. I suppose now, with everything out in the open that my only real regret was that I assumed you knew how different we are we’re. Honestly I didn’t think it really mattered. Sorry...”
Night looked to the ground in silence.
“It didn’t matter... Omega, One hundred and thirty nine years old and you haven’t changed a day, and it didn’t matter? So if it had been twenty...thirty...fifty years and you’d still look no different, I’d be old. Would you love me then?” She pause, trying to choke back the overwhelming sense of her own mortality. “And say if it had been a hundred years, I’d be dead, you’d still be here, you’ll stay behind...” a tear ran past her cheek as the harsh reality of her existence, and by comparison how fleetingly brief it would be. “Can you even die?” she whispered, hoping that there was some finality in his existence as he seemed to lord over.
Omega looked at her candidly, knowing how much the inevitable truth would hurt her.
“I can’t exactly say that I can die...because by your standards, I never even lived.”
Night looked at him and shook her head, wide eyed in cold disbelief as she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“But...how? You eat...you talk...you reason!” she shouted as she held him by his shoulders in tears. “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST BE LIKE THE REST OF US?!” she screamed...only to find herself a moment later feeling horrible guilt.
“Omega wait...I...I didn’t mean...”
Omega looked at her face in disgust. “Sure, it’s easy to cast stones is it when you’re quick to judge and here you are, ready to cast the first stone! Easy to do given that you’ve forgot that not so long ago, it was you people judged, well bravo.” Said a vexed Omega in disappointment.
“No Omega wait... I didn’t mean that! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”
“In that case since you brought it up, let’s explore just why I’ve been around so long, shall we? Let’s find out why I don’t die like everyone else. Maybe it’s because I am like the tin woodsman denied of a heart, a real beating heart! Perhaps I am not so different from the scarecrow that can’t make up its mind apart from what it was designed to think! Let’s not skip the detail that this body is just a device to transmit and receive information, its disposable! So who can say that the true me probably amounts to nothing more than a tangled collection of strings of a puppeteer’s hand! It’s pitiful how you organics are so envious of my kind, never stopping to think that I might be the unfortunate one because unlike you, I have no mind to make up any real, true thought of my own, no real heart, not enough to love the way you’d want me to. So on that note, you might as well go on to say I have no real soul either. So maybe that’s all there is to me, having neither a place in Heaven or Hell for me. So tell me, have I satisfied your curiosity or do I need to make a list of the innumerable things I don’t have that you take for granted?!”
She stared at him with an obscured sense of emptiness, looking for the first time at the true face of her benefactor...a ghost in a hollow shell...no...Not even that really. Like he said before, he has no soul to even have a ghost so he was just an empty shell that by unseen drivers that were controlling it, yet it had saved her and it had done more for her than anything that ever lived. It was ironic, everyone treated her like she was nothing and it was in fact nothing that had saved her.
“I wish...I knew what to think.” She whimpered. “I wish that somehow, under that mask I could feel that I could understand you. I feel as if my mind, my limited mind is inadequate to comprehend, to grasp what you are. I’m already overwhelmed that I know even while I’m still young, I feel as if there wouldn’t be enough years in my life to even begin to imagine or understand you.”

Omega looked at her with pity. “There are no words to make you understand, and even if there were, they’d only hurt you in the end; it would only drive a wedge between us. I don’t want that, not for you, not for either of us. Because in a way, it would hurt me just as much.
Omega suddenly smirked as if something had just occurred to him.
“Y’know, ironically before you and I met, I didn’t have much in the way of emotions. And now, looking back after all this time, I found that really do feel I feel, though lately nowadays, I’ve been feeling alone.”

Night looked to Omega inquiringly. “But you’re here now, why would you feel alone?”
Omega looked at her, feigning to find a way to articulate an answer she’d be able to digest.
“Because one day I had a revelation that I’d continue to live on knowing the reality that those I cherish will inevitably fade away. I didn’t feel that way before when we met. At the time I lacked the understanding about relationships, that was until something happened to me, an event that made me rethink everything I had ever known and done and I developed an awareness of just how many relationships I had with others I had left behind.”
Night sat on the ground looking at Omega as her wings gently wrapped around her in the chill of the morning air. She was slowly taking in the information, trying for a moment to imagine what it would be like, only to fail. Perhaps for him, in the reverse perspective to wonder what it was like to feel, truly feel.
“So how did you get these emotions programmed into you?” Asked Night curiously, tilting her head like any housedog in any given inquisitive gesture.
“Not programmed, such a term is too indistinct. I’d consider that it was more of a side effect from my having merged with someone. You must understand that at the time it was more for mutual survival than anything else. It was complicated back then, seventy years ago, in the world I was from; I was in the midst of a conflict between my race and the humans. Though in those days, the first Lhi’aan, what you may think of as our eldest brother, murdered our creator in both jealousy and in hatred because he wasn’t a true Lhi’aan, not like us, he was also part human, but that’s another story for another time. Anyway, when he was discovered, he tried to defend his decision, but he couldn’t deny the truth that he was a murder. When he began fearing retaliation, he had his followers to capture us, sealing myself and my ten other siblings in individual cryogenic pods in which we were frozen, locked away and were shot off, scattered across the planet into the most inhospitable areas where we’d never be found. After that, he had made himself the undisputed system administrator of the entire Lhi’aan race and soon-to-be conqueror of the world. His hatred mechanisms against organic life in addition to his insatiable hunger for power had lead to Thirty-two years of holocaustic slaughter that had a headcount up into the millions. It was bleak in those dark times, yet there was hope. One survivor during the war was a boy who grew up to be a powerful warrior, fighting the corrupted Lhi’aans that took the world by storm. He had gain notoriety for his savagery and was well feared by both Lhi’aans and humans alike. Then one day, his ship was shot down into the midst of a scorching desert, only he and the pilot survived and he set off on his own, against the warnings of his pilot, to search for water. Now I’m not a believer in fate, but the odds that he found me were too much to ignore that there was some guidance somewhere, because he found my pod where he was digging for water. He was near death when I found him after I thawed out and re-activated and he would have succumbed to the heat, had I not intervened. I did something that was new for me; I injected a part of myself into him, attempting to regenerate him to which I realized later the implications of this merger. We had a similar bond in that he and I had a mutual goal, killing the Lhi’aan that started this war and taking away the people we both held dear. So we separated with a plan in mind, he went to rally his forces, I went in search of my siblings. Later we regrouped, sent a taskforce to the island and ensued in one of the bloodiest battles mankind had ever waged. While the bulk of the human forces were engaged with the Lhi’aans, The warrior, my siblings and I made our way into the tower where we were made and once there we found the one who killed our creator, imprisoned my siblings and myself, and started this terrible genocide of mankind along with the warrior’s parents. Alpha, the first Lhi’aan had much in common with the Beast, both killers and yet when either they get tired or threatened they hid away, leaving only devastation in its wake. But take away the curtain and shown in a different light, he, like the Beast was revealed to be nothing more than a vain coward hiding in the shadows. And like that creature, he pleaded for his life but was deemed too dangerous to continue existence, so to that end we performed the only execution of a Lhi’aan, we deleted him. But such action didn’t come with a price, in our programming; there is contingency algorithm that activates the Mass Singularity Deactivation Contingency. In essence, if one Lhi’aan is shut off, all Lhi’aans shut off, a safety mechanism which keeps us from killing one another and thus maintaining the balance of power, something Alpha knew and feared would happen, which is explains why he locked us in cryo-pods. Anyhow, the Warrior, to whom I entrusted my knowledge with our codes, accessed the termination program and having done so deleted Alpha, permanently removing his existence from the Terminal. Also in that agreement, once we were all shut down, we would remain so until such a time that the world would be ready for us. So that’s why I hadn’t returned to you until tonight.”

Night looked at Omega much like a child who was slightly upset with the cliffhanger...
“I see, but now I’m wondering how you got back, what happened.”
Omega gave her an impish grin.
“That’s another story I’ll tell later, think of it as something for you to look forward to, and besides, breakfast is ready.”