Once the sun sets, the desert air is frigid.
Chills ran up his back from the breeze. Dark green sand flew around his ankles and into his boot, lodging itself underneath the sole of his foot. It chafed against the rough skin. A pack of blue-horned jackals howled in the distance. Oil slicked up his arms, dirt caked under cuticles and into metal joints. Whether they were tense and slow from the cold or overuse, he couldn’t tell. His body probably needed to be rewound after so many units standing, but the work was invigorating. It was his own well of energy both mental and physical, a personal heater of determination.
Green dunes, green circuit boards.
There is green- viscous, gelatinous- blurring through the edge of his vision. His fingers stalled, but he just smacked his wrist to loosen them.
He is exhausted, searching for that well of persistence once so abundant, now lost far behind, ahead, floating in where he is not. Gooseflesh is lost halfway down his spine. Stuck, he is stuck…
The sky nettles sing sweet songs every dawn.
Deep tones reverberated through his eardrums, flowing through the hallways he called home. The corridors were massive, decorative white-steel amphitheaters with pearl moldings. As he ran, footsteps echoed loud, the uneven beats of small feet zigzagged across open floors.
Harsh metallic footfalls come from all directions.
Mother took her coffee on the opalescent balcony, to watch for the pale-pink tentacles weaving around each high-rise tower. Her mug’s sickly-sweet scent carried through the light breeze, more vanilla cream and sugar than coffee, the color of the liquid practically melted into the porcelain. She would sit behind him, running perfectly manicured fingernails down his shirt as she hummed in answer to the nettles’ call. A whispered mantra, as if she could speak it into existence, My baby…my sweet…my baby Ista…my sweet baby. Her hand came up to cradle his, one cool palm against chubby, sweaty fingers. Soft flesh met soft flesh.
His knee twitches, but the clang is muffled. He can’t move, surrounded by a thickened prison forever a second away from pooling down his throat and into his broken lungs. There is no running here, and the smell is a toxic brine.
Stalling amidst the galaxy fills the cockpit with darkness.
A neglected cup of coffee sat to the right of the console, dark black inky sludge.
There is no vanilla here.
Metal fingers drummed odd rhythms against inoperative switches, dim buttons, titanium panels. Taptaptap…tap…taptap…tap…
Gravity had no hold on an object suspended and made minuscule in the expanse of space. It must have been a slow spiral. A bored spiral. He was stuck sitting with the knowledge of failure. It’s bitter. An object, a body, a conscious left lying in sludge. Viscous. He let his eyes fall closed, and the whirring of the new mechanism in his left eye vibrated through his skull. He lays here for hours. Days? Years? Nanoseconds? He sat until the life-support alert trilled throughout the ship, ringing through his head and across his wires. A static ringing is just beyond his ears. It is muffled. He stood up, and popped the control panel to manually restart the core. But he can’t move. Can barely peel open his eyes. To faint blinking lights. Green muffles them all. Arms are weighted. Legs frozen. Mind buzzing. Tap…taptap…tap…
He’s just exhausted. The faint hum of an engine at the corner of his mind keeps him from sleep, no matter how much the green pulls him towards unconsciousness. When the engine stalled, he couldn’t escape the vitriol at his own failure. Now the stall is constant, a ceaseless restart, always ending in another eternity of failure.
I’m sorry I’m so bitter, Mother. I’m just tired.
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