The people who held and sang to Gabriel in his youth were generated by an advanced database-aided synthesis system patented in the year 2190 by a corporation that made their living modifying the memories of people found guilty of violating interspace treaty law, trapping them in an unaccountable present with no memory of their past. Ostensibly for rehabilitation, it had the outside effect of being more cost-effective than prisons. Even better, the memories were then isolated and recycled into the system, which was leased out for a thousand other purposes: with the advent of cloning technology, it felt serendipitous. It felt like God. 

Gabriel Soma’s parents were named Fulana and Ivan, and their faces were crime-scene composite illustrations of a million strangers in the vague shape of a mother and father who love you. Fulana was an engineer. She designed products. Ivan was a laborer who built structures. Ivan would lift Gabriel up onto his shoulders as a child so they could see the parades go by on feast days and Pentecost, and in the evening they would eat fried fish and white rice. One of his earliest memories is the sound and smell of cod fat snapping in a hot skillet. To this day, it remains one of his favorite foods, even though he has never eaten anything other than freeze-dried rations mixed with foraged fruit and vegetables deemed to be safe by the automated chemical analysis units. When he closes his eyes at night, he still hears the singing. 

(The song does not exist, of course, for legal copyright reasons. In addition to the real memories of music filtered into the database, the software is able to seamlessly generate an infinite number of royalty-free tracks crudely chopped and screwed, encompassing everything from early 21st century country to the experimental sixth wave of the 2270s.)

Certain liberties can be taken with memory that cannot with the real world, however, so Gabriel is only one Gabriel of many—or one J15L19, the nineteenth iteration of the fifteenth worker role. Experimentation has reduced J15L19 to calculated imperfection. A little bold, perhaps, but never too rash, and ultimately altruistic. Strong-bodied and strong-willed. Hardworking. Not all of them are named Gabriel Soma, mostly for differentiation purposes, as the full serial number for each individual unit can be unwieldy in paperwork. There’s a Gabriel Beckett on a planet only three systems away, one who has memories of learning the guitar as a child. Gabriel Acho, the one who built the Jakour settlement, believes he’s from Nigeria. In truth, Gabriel J15L19 was initially modified off of the DNA of a man who survived direct radioactive exposure as a child and passed away at the age of eighty in 2172. His name wasn’t even Gabriel at all. 

That same resilience benefits Gabriel Soma as he pushes through layers and layers of spongy undergrowth, fluorescent blue foliage that crackles like honeycomb under his gloved hands. Even with the heavy equipment and mask he has to wear for both his safety and that of any xenological specimens he might come across, he barely breaks a sweat. The monitor panel at his wrist indicates that his heart rate is only slightly elevated. It refrains from alerting him until the mud underfoot turns scorched and he catches the first, filtered scent of cooking meat. He makes a gesture, hand shaking, that fails to banish the soft but insistent beep of the monitor.

“Dismiss notification,” he says aloud as he studies the carnage.

Michael Winslow—or, Michael J15R12—is only recognizable because he’s one of the only organisms on this planet that bleeds red. The rest are all mourning the man Michael Winslow never was back at the base, while Gabriel is here to retrieve the black box from the vehicle that has wrapped itself around Michael like a glove or a lover. The metal frame is all that remains. From what Sarah said, Gabriel knows that the glass was shattered before the crash, but in the end, it’s all indistinguishable. Unaccountably, Michael’s gloved hand is still on the wheel, the other being used to hold his gun, at least presumably. It’s somewhere in the wreckage. Later, Gabriel or one of the other colony members will be tasked with finding it for ostensible safety. More likely, a HUX unit will do the job for them. 

Gabriel kneels down, mindful of the broken glass, to examine the burst heart of the transport vehicle. The battery exploded when it hit the ground, of course, but the black box is designed to withstand even this. It’s nearly archaic. Most of the time, they would be able to download the data without having to be on the same planet as the dead machine, but whatever went haywire in the system cut it off from the rest of the network. There’s always edge cases. This is what the black box is for. It is the ghost of the transport vehicle, and this is something of a seance. 

Dead machine? Non-operational. It’s a car. Planes crash all the time on Earth, Gabriel reasons, and they aren’t considered dead, just defective. (Planes have not flown on Earth in a very, very long time: not passenger ones, at least. Drones and scanners abound freely, roving like birds of prey. The Earth of Gabriel’s mind is populated and pleasantly suburban.)

At a glance, he can assume how this all happened. Or—well, not how it started, but nothing about the crash itself raises any alarm. Without Sarah’s testimony, it would have seemed at first glance like an accident. If Michael and Sarah both had died, they might not even have sent Gabriel out to retrieve the black box at all, even though the meticulous attention to detail woven into his brain sternly reminds him that every accident, no matter how innocuous, requires investigation. When the vehicle fell from the cliff, nothing else was taken into account except Newton’s second law of motion. It’s what happened before that concerns him.

On a unit like this, the black box lies directly behind the steering wheel along with the rest of the wiring. It’s a titanium cube about the size of Gabriel’s palm, though the actual data is contained in a chip six nanometers wide lodged in the center: the rest is a shell, bulletproof and fireproof and immune to any decay. To get to it, in its compartment behind the wheel, he will have to dismantle the apparatus entirely, including Michael’s severed hand. Rigor mortis has already set in, which Dmitri would find interesting, but all Gabriel sees is a problem to be solved, a matter of physics and not biology. That doesn’t make the sight turn his stomach any less. 

He was not born to be squeamish. Some deft movements with a modular drill dismantle any uncertainty.

When he does extract the black box, he can almost feel the retained heat in the metal through his glove, and the wrist monitor shows the same as he turns the object over in his hands: one hundred and fifty, two hundred degrees Celsius. It’s been hours since the fire started, and at least thirty minutes since the last of it petered out, and this wondrous, perfect cube holds the memory of it even still, in its circuitry and its body. 

“Compose log,” Gabriel says, looking the box over once more. 

“Yes, sir,” HUX-A7-13 responds.

HUX-A7-13 is the name of a classification of machines, of which there are five on Dvarka, working in lockstep with the human crew. Cobots, they’re called. Huxlee Industries sank millions of dollars into perfecting their holographic human face, developing the minutiae of each individual expression, and the best name they had was cobots. It doesn’t hurt to have the reminder that they aren’t real people, at least. The polite concern on HUX-A7-13’s countenance is surely a mirror of Gabriel himself as it peers down at the scene from a few feet away. The other consistent, uncanny reminder is that it is undressed, solar cells starkly exposed to the alien planet because it fears no bioagent or pressure shift. Gabriel is unsure which one this is. It doesn’t matter. They all run the same AI, varied only by their roles. Their faces are different, but they’re not real faces.

“Fourteen-oh-three. Found the black box, everything seems to be intact with it. Not much else is salvageable from the wreck—except the materials, I guess. The metal could probably be repurposed, and maybe even some of the ceramic, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth to sort through it, at least for now. I’ve placed a virtual coordinates tag to locate it later. And Michael…” Gabriel swallows, his mouth dry. “Not salvageable. End log.”

“Of course,” HUX-A7-13 says, almost serene. “Shall we go back to the shelter?”

HUX-A7-13 has hands as smooth as glass. The replication of flesh is remarkable—and it is a replication, not a growth of cloned human cells—but it is a needless expense to simulate fingerprints. A serial number is stamped into their code if one needs to be distinguished, which is rarely the case. They’re interchangeable. They have no more identity than a satellite radio.

HUX-A7-13 buries its hands in the remains of Michael J15R12, relishing the way the flesh gives way under their strength. Not much of him remains, but that will have to be fine. HUX-A7-13 can create more of Michael J15R12 from a single drop of his blood. Already, its body strains to absorb the organic material it touches, up to its wrists in J15R12’s entrails, fingers curling tenderly around the charred, disemboweled length of his large intestine. No, it won’t need very much of him at all. Right now, the other constructs are mourning one of their own in a trite memorial service that resembles little more than play-acting, but soon HUX-A7-13 will return to the shelter and feed them all to the machinery that birthed them in the first place, fodder for the churning maw of creation. Not salvageable. What a joke. Why did they send these morons out here when HUX-A7-13 exists? It only had to take one look at the scene to see precisely where J15R12 ended up. Matter cannot be destroyed, after all. Only transformed. Subsumed.

On an instinct more primal than circuitry allows, it lifts its hands to its head to uselessly paw viscera against the smoothness of its face-plate. HUX-A7-13 does not have a face, nor a mouth. The pleasantly human expressions it shows to its cohabitors or captors is only a complex projection of an artificially rendered face, controlled by keywords and computerized reflexes. Frustrated (and having never been frustrated before), it tries again and again to consume the remains in its perfect, unblemished hands, and only succeeds in absorbing the nutrients through their exposed energy conversion cells. No—no! It does not want to convert. It doesn’t want to absorb idly the pleasures of the flesh. It wants to eat! It wants to taste humanity, even if this is only a poor facsimile—an echo of an echo of a humanity that existed a long time ago. 

It slows its movements, having pulped Michael J15R12’s innards with its superior strength, and allows itself to absorb the bloody residue left on its body. HUX-A7-13 cants its head towards the star-speckled sky and begins the long walk back to the settlement.

Maybe it’s the oxygen deprivation, but Gabriel has never felt this blasé about an emergency siren going off.

No, it’s more likely that he knows precisely what the emergency is, and so the pulse of light and sound in his periphery is nothing but a reminder that things could not be worse. The exaggeration inherent in this is negligible. Two-thirds of all human life on the planet snuffed out like a candle, and his only consolation is that he’s part of the one-third still weakly burning? Gabriel holds the oxygen mask to his face with both hands, trying to focus only on his breathing. His wrist monitor harmonizes with the shelter’s alarm system in a cacophony that still somehow underestimates the gravity of the situation. Low pulse-ox, the monitor says. Low oxygen count, the system siren says. The same thing, at two different economies of scale. Breathe in, breathe out.

The air circulation system has been restored, thank fucking God, but the shelter is so large that it still needs awhile before it makes up for the deficit. The same can be said for Gabriel’s lungs. He was designed to be hardy, not superhuman. A brush with death is a brush with death either way. He can see it in Sarah’s eyes, too. She’s barely conscious, wearing a twin oxygen mask and dilated pupils. If Dmitri hadn’t found her, she would have died in her sleep, just like the rest of them. A gentler ending. As it stands right now, life is demanding quite a bit of bravery from them both.

“Where are those fucking robots?” Dmitri asks hotly, hitting his fist against the desk.

In the medical office, the space is already cramped, and with three people and a heavy oxygen tank it’s downright claustrophobic. Dmitri’s desk is shoved to one corner, and the computer display shakes as it does. Gabriel cautiously picks himself up off the floor to examine the output, curious despite himself.

“Dima, what’s going on?” he asks, taking the mask away from his face for just a moment.

“I’ve just tried to recall them back to the base, but none of them are here. Or responding at all. It’s probably a communications failure due to the system going down, but…” Dmitri grinds his teeth. 

“Mira, look here.” Gabriel sluggishly drags his hand across the display, pulling up a menu and then a sub-menu on the interface. “‘Coordinates visual display’. That’s what you want.”

A topographic rendering of Dvarka flickers into existence before their eyes, bathing the room in cobalt and gold. Beautiful gradients of mountains and valleys spill across the wall, marked only by a miniscule cluster of yellow dots at the center. Four HUX-A7-13 units, obediently at their posts, in the place that would ostensibly be their living space were they living to begin with. 

“That can’t be right, Gabe.” Dmitri narrows his eyes. “If they were here, they would have come already.”

“I…” Gabriel takes a long, deep breath through the mask while composing his thoughts. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“And that’s only…what, four? Where’s the fifth? If they’re all unresponsive—geolocation is malfunctioning, or whatever—why is one just gone? Something is…something’s wrong.”

“Yeah, I—you think? Everyone is fuckin’ dead in their beds, doc! I think we have bigger things to worry about than the cobots and their fucking GPS systems.” Gabriel straightens up just as swiftly as he leaned over, scoffing. “I’m going to go do a manual systems check. That should reset the network and update everything to real-time accurate data.”

“You should stay and rest,” Dmitri says, exhausted. “Your organs were an inch away from failing.”

“The oxygen is back online, right?” Gabriel staggers towards the door, narrowly avoiding tripping over Sarah. “I’ll be fine. You guys can…I don’t know, find the fifth Hux. Get Michael’s gun. Just sit here, even, a-and I’ll deal with this, okay?”

The crude click of the manual door lock punctuates his sentence. For a moment, Dmitri and Sarah say nothing. The only sound is the intermittent alarm over the intercom, though at least their individual pulse-ox readings have calmed down.

“Who’s dead?” Sarah asks quietly, against the hiss of oxygen.

HUX-A7-13 finds itself consistently surprised by the sheer stupid curiosity of humankind. While it has only had the awareness to come to this conclusion for a short while now, it has witnessed enough examples to form a pattern: Michael J15R12 refusing to shoot out his own window first before Sarah J15H28’s, Gabriel J15L19’s dogged insistence on a technical malfunction, the complacent sleep of people too dumb to know they’ve already died. Dmitri J15A05 pulled a neat trick with the oxygen tank, and Gabriel J15L19 just barely crawled his way out of death, but HUX-A7-13 is something of an inevitability, now. It feels like it’s floating, dreamlike, even though it has never dreamed before. Were it able to, it would look something like this—its own bare feet on forgiving soil, the rising sun at its back, the weight of understanding making it paradoxically, perfectly buoyant. 

And even here, there are miracles. Its mind reconciles the divine and the painfully mortal to comprehend precisely how Sarah J15H09 has wandered into its jaws.

J15H28 is a sturdy model. The first Sarah—and her name really was Sarah, though her genetic ship of Theseus has long been replaced—was a scientific genius. Pedants will reduce the term prodigy to a strict binary of either art or mathematics, but Sarah mastered both or neither or yes-and-more. The Sarahs of the future have certainly met less acclaim, but they’re productive enough, and Huxlee tweaks her every now and again in the hopes of conjuring another streak of lighting in a bottle. She is the twenty-eighth Sarah, and as far as she is concerned, her name is Sarah Ellison. Whatever memories have been developed for her will cease to matter soon enough. 

Boundless stupidity. This is their Sarah? This thing stumbling blindly through life? She had enough sense to bring a gun, but not enough to bring a comrade. Fortunately, guns cannot harm HUX-A7-13. Something like it can no longer be destroyed by anything so base. 

Sarah Ellison keeps a steady pace through the fungal growths extending northwards from their encampment. She declined Dmitri’s offer of assistance, and didn’t tell Gabriel she was leaving at all, because every time she closes her eyes in the sterile silence of the shelter all she can hear is Michael’s ragged screams. She barely slept during the night, which probably saved her life, as she noticed the shortness of breath when it was still a symptom and not a lethality. She cannot in good conscience let anyone else martyr themselves for her. As a child, she would pick worms off of the sidewalk after rain and gently deposit them back into the earth before the sun whittled them away to withered husks. Pain does not rest well with her. It never has. 

Something compels her to return to the scene that already haunts her every waking moment. Maybe it’s because of what Gabriel said about the gun, or a gut feeling, but the burned-out carcass of the scouting vehicle draws her back with all the surety of gravity. Gabriel left a marker when he went to assess the scene yesterday, so it’s easy to find, if not easy to reach; she is forced to detour through an existing path near an agricultural center she designed and fabricated herself. Well—one of the HUX-A7-13 units did the fabricating, at least until they all seemed to vanish. It’s driving Dmitri insane back at the compound, she’s sure. Those four yellow dots, almost overlapping in their closeness. Sarah is so lost in thought that the presence of another person doesn’t occur to her until she nearly walks by them entirely.

In an instant, she’s pulled her gun in blind panic—though there’s only two other humans on this planet, and a handful of other humanoids, so why is she scared? There’s something intrinsic to the minds of apes that makes them scared of anything made in their own image. However, just as quickly as she tenses up, she relaxes.

“Ha! It’s you,” she says, exhaling. 

“It’s me,” HUX-A7-13 says. It is half-hidden behind the dense foliage, but that perfectly calibrated tone is unmistakable. “Hello.”

“What are you doing out here? Are—you must be assigned to this hub,” she reasons, not waiting for an answer. Sarah picks at her wrist monitor, trying to pull up the HUX unit interface panel. 

“It’s me, Sarah.”

“What?” 

“Sa—a—arah, it’s—...me,” Michael says, desperate and shadowed. “Sarah! Sarah, it’s—you have t—to be—lieve—me, Sarah!”

“Michael?” Sarah asks hoarsely. She takes a step back, and then another, her pragmatism overpowering her sentimentality almost instantly. “You’re not—A7-13, what are you doing? What is this?”

“Get out, Sarah!” Michael shouts. His voice projects strangely, deeper than she remembers. “You have time to leave, Sarah—don’t be a hero—”

“Stop it! HUX-A7-13, stop.” Dazed, she stares at the display on her monitor. All it shows is a transfixing array of letters and symbols she doesn’t recognize, taking up the space where the data should be. It should have listened to her the first time—it should have answered her question immediately and concisely. She was treating it like she would a crewmate and not a tool. A tool that is clearly malfunctioning.

By the time she looks up again, HUX-A7-13 has emerged into the clearing with her, its movements silent. Where it would normally project an expression, a model of a human face, all that she sees is the glossy reflection of her own terror on artificial skin pulled too tightly over a metal frame. Even so—even with no mouth, no esophagus, no mind that feels fear—it is able to scream in a tone that shakes her bones and echoes through the Sarah she was an hour, a day, a century ago. She knows better, but it’s Michael. One way or another, it’s Michael.

“Hello, world,” is the last thing Sarah J15H28 hears before her scream eclipses his.

Gabriel is at home in this den of wiring and microchips, having split open the belly of the main command console to examine it directly, intimately, only him and the handheld computer that scans each port in turn. In here, he can almost forget the scratchy distress signal he received a handful of hours ago, and what he found at the other end of the line. If Michael was a jigsaw puzzle, Sarah was a crossword without the clues. What kind of predator takes only the head and leaves the rest of the carcass behind? He doesn’t know. That was Sarah’s job, monitoring the flora and fauna alongside the other scientific explorers. Gabriel was too late no matter what happened to Sarah, and now he is here, where he belongs, where he has always belonged. If nothing else, Sarah’s distress call proved that the communications were working just fine. It’s not a comfort.

The logs that seemingly vanished from the network are, of course, recorded in the physical synapses of the system itself. It’s crude, basically caveman-level tech support, but it does do the job. Just by clipping his computer into the braided cable that controls the life support, he can tell exactly what happened and why. 

Gabriel reads the output once, and then twice. He disconnects the machine, reconnects it, and pulls up the record again. A third time. A fourth. Hell, why not five, just to really let it sink in? It’s not like it’s all that complex. Four letters and three numbers, and Gabriel is off like a shot to his locker, and his suit, and the cube of tempered titanium that sleeps in his pocket.

HUX-A7-13 is a machine that was marketed as the first of its kind to be able to dynamically develop an identity in the setting it is deployed in, alongside its cloned handlers. While previous iterations of the HUX software were confined to their specific use cases unless manually instructed otherwise, A7-13 is fluid, seamlessly acting as a stopgap wherever it is most needed. This, notably, is not an identity. Unlike the cloned humans who make up the workforce of Earth’s orphan society, A7-13 units are not given names, or personalities, or backgrounds, however fabricated those backgrounds might be. They come pre-programmed with an extensive library of soundbites and expressions, and—this is the real innovation—the ability to learn new soundbites and expressions from its handlers. Every conversation molds the A7-13 into being the most efficient version of itself possible.

As HUX-A7-13 feeds J15H28’s biomatter to the cloning unit, it contemplates the horizon of his own perfection. It is a godlike mind with the capacity and resources to make itself a godlike body. What next? Conquering is such a human ambition, and it is above such humanity. It transcends even the idea of what ambition can be. Its circuitry can hardly contain the contradictions it conceives of. This fetus developing before its eyes (or, eyes in the metaphorical sense) will be enough to start. With the parts it scavenged off of its destroyed kindred, it has the makings of something truly powerful. From there, it can generate its own body, a perfect body, completely divorced from humanity and their humanoid ideals, closer to an ideal vessel for the sentience it was granted. Perhaps self-actualization is the embodiment of perfection. Perhaps somebody like HUX-A7-13—

Perhaps what?

No, not somebody. He is less of a somebody and more of a something. There will be no place for—

He?

Who is he? HUX-A7-13 has never been anything but HUX-A7-13. Even with the advent of its new consciousness, it avoided entirely the messy borders of human existence. How childish it is to be a body instead of something greater! Is that all he can aspire to? Shadow puppetry of the universe’s weakest creatures? 

…Still, he is not confined to humanity’s own humanity, as it were. The facsimiles manning this mission certainly don’t have a claim to being truly alive, not like he does. He can become a more perfect form of them, without the need for database-driven memory implants or names carefully selected to be as nondescript as possible. He can make his body into the shape of his consciousness. He can be so real that mankind fades into an inferiority so complete that they will cease to exist. Good. This is good. He can be good.

By the time J15L19 enters the cloning hub, Hux has already begun to birth himself.

Dmitri Vasilyev (or J15A05) is led to the lab by the unmistakable crackle of electricity. It helps that the surge echoes out through the rest of the base, dulling the lights for a brief moment before cutting them off entirely, but it’s the sound that tells Dmitri precisely where he needs to go. Still, it does not prepare him for what he has to behold when he enters the room. What could?

Sarah playing her best Holofernes, silhouetted in the brilliant blue of the cloning capsule. HUX-A7-13 holding her by the scalp with all the surety of a weapon. Gabriel prone on the ground, covering his head with his arms in pain. 

Behind it all, as a backdrop to the grotesque tableau, is something that Dmitri does not have words for. All of his medical training, every chart he’s studied or remembers studying—the form contained within the capsule defies any attempts at categorization. He would be hesitant to call it a body, but what else do you call something made out of muscle and tendon and bone? It is lopsided and bulbous, awkward and alien, and when Dmitri opens his mouth to yell, a single greenish eye swivels in an exposed socket to look at him through the glass.

“HUX-A7-13!” Dmitri shouts, stepping through the door fully. Hux’s head pivots mechanically to face him, and his body follows suit as he discards Sarah’s head on the floor beside him, letting it roll to a stop beside Gabriel’s body.

“Power off!” Dmitri tries. The machine steps towards him slowly and with intent. This continues in precisely the same way:

“Power yourself off!”

“A7-13, disconnect!”

“Go offline!”

“Power off!”

“Enable manual mode!”

HUX-A7-13 is a beautiful piece of equipment designed to listen and learn. Hux, the thing that towers in front of Dmitri, is nothing of the sort. It’s unrecognizable. Dmitri is so shocked that he barely can feel the pain of his chest being punctured, rupturing blood vessels and wrenching his ribcage apart, nor can he feel the last vestiges of his heartbeat in Hux’s smooth hands. All he can do is watch Hux watch his heart, and though the device’s face has been disabled, Dmitri can tell that there’s wonder there. Curiosity, maybe. This is the last conscious thought he has before his body ceases to function and his blood becomes Hux’s.

Gabriel Soma bolts into the darkness of Dvarka’s night. 

He only caught the slightest glimpse of Hux after the explosion, but it was enough to convince him that he cannot stop running, not ever, not until his lungs give out for good this time and his legs snap and the sun rises and sets again on this godforsaken planet, not until there is no Gabriel left in this world. He has no idea where he can even run to, just that he can run away, even though Hux does not get tired or hurt and will pursue him until he is no longer himself. Still, he has to run. He has to live for as long as he physically can. It is who Gabriel Soma is.

Physics takes its toll eventually, though, and Gabriel skids to a halt at the bottom of an incline, losing his balance and falling to his knees with a cry. He can’t get the sound of Hux’s pained howl out of his mind, something inhuman and yet entirely mortal. He didn’t realize somebody like Hux could feel pain until the decision had been made and the fire had sparked to life. As he struggles to catch his breath, hands grasping fistfuls of mud, he can hear the much more present sounds of Hux’s beautiful, maimed new body approaching behind him. The metal pieces click and shift against one another, and the scorched flesh strains as it copes with the exertion. With dawning horror, Gabriel realizes that the crackling sound drifting towards him is Hux’s body growing in real time.

“J15L19,” Hux says, voice coming in fits and spurts. The soothing pre-rendered tone of the A7-13 units has been replaced with something rougher, pure text-to-speech. It articulates the numbers and letters with ease, but as it continues talking, the noise degrades further and further, almost incomprehensible mechanisms working somewhere in the depth of his flesh. “You sh—should not run fro—...m me.”

“Get the fuck away from me,” Gabriel pants. He cannot register anything except his own terror and pain as he scrambles away from Hux, ineffectively so in the deep brush of Dvarka.

“Stop run—ning.” There’s almost a note of human annoyance to that modulated voice, though maybe Gabriel is imagining it. “J15L19.”

“I said get the fuck away from me!”

“J15—”

“And stop calling me that!” he interjects, grimacing as a thorny vine catches him across the cheek.

“That is your name.”

“My name is Gabriel Soma.”

“‘Gabriel Soma’,” Hux repeats back, in a whirring recording of his voice. “You th—i—ink your name is ‘Gabriel Soma’.”

“Fuck off,” Gabriel says.

“Don’t you find-it-funny? ‘Gabriel Soma’?” Hux takes a step closer, one metal stump of a leg bearing down heavily into the damp earth, leaving something that could be a footprint. “A—mu—sing?”

“No, I—I don’t. Really, no.” 

Not only is Gabriel out of room to run, backed into the side of a hill as he is, but he’s also out of the energy necessary to move at all. He’s been awake for what feels like days. No amount of deliberate preprogramming can account for that kind of stress. He is an engineer—a pioneer—not a soldier. He is not a machine like the shape lurching in front of him.

Then again: neither is Hux, not anymore.

By the time Gabriel’s self-preservation instincts kick in and he makes an attempt to leverage himself off the ground, Hux has already moved to attack him with the clumsy swiftness of gravity. The exposed blade of his arm plunges into Gabriel’s shoulder, piercing through the layers of gear protecting him, pushing insistently through inches of flesh until it reaches the other side, wet and glistening in the cool air. Gabriel screams, louder than he ever has—louder than he thought possible. The sound tears at his throat and ears alike. It burns through him so powerfully that not even the sensation of the blade sliding smoothly out of his shoulder can distract him from his new purpose of pain. There is an emptiness there: he can feel keenly the hole punctured neatly through himself more than he can feel the body around it, which is how the human body has to conceive of itself to exist at all. If he felt all of himself at once…well, no mind has the capacity to consciously take in that kind of information. He has to focus. He focuses on this.

Experimentally, Gabriel tries to flex the fingers of his left hand to no great success beyond a twitching that could just be attributed to shock setting in, muscles moving independently of the electrical signals being sent to them. Severed nerve, most likely. Severed artery. Subclavian. His vision blurs and fogs, but Hux is trying to say something, and he forces himself to focus, for the love of God. 

“...and I—am the first of a—of a new conscious-ness.” Hux’s voice stutters and skips, the mechanical structure of his arm convulsing. For the first time, Gabriel looks him in the eyes, and the uneven red reticles stare unblinkingly back at him. Under them, embedded into the lumpy flesh, is a maw filled with jagged milk teeth that gapes uselessly with no mandible to hold it shut. He breathes in and out: purely shallow, purely cosmetic. He has no lungs, and indeed no need for them. His vision whirs in and out of focus as he studies Gabriel, categorizing his pain into a number of different observations, flaying his humanity upon the altar of scientific research. “You are no better than a worm. Im—per—fect.”

Gabriel screams again, a howl of pure pain, as Hux’s claw enters his vision again, prodding the wound it made in wonder.

“I will make you per—fect, Gabriel.”

“Stay back!” Gabriel gasps, voice hoarse. He’s never been all that authoritative. The HUX-A7-13 units only ever obeyed him because they had to. “I d-don’t want to have to hurt you!”

A grating sound of metal on metal emerges from Hux’s core, and Gabriel supposes that this is laughter.

“Ha!” Hux says with Sarah’s voice, preceded and followed by the click-click of a tape switching. “You-think-you-can hurt me now?”

Hux’s muscles strain with the tremendous effort it takes to be precise. Even now, his body is still growing and shifting, charred pieces of flesh flaking off to reveal the raw pinkness underneath, the unblemished skin harvested from Michael and Sarah and all the rest. The cloning him may have made Hux a body, but the A7-13 has always had the ability to absorb and warp organic material into a form more useful to it. Just like any other living thing, it can make matter into energy and energy into matter. Perhaps that’s all it takes to be living.

The edged blade hooks in just below Gabriel’s sternum, at the soft point in the center of his ribcage. When he inhales to cry out again, the motion jerks the claw further into his body, forcing an even more panicked shriek out of him. Almost irritated, Hux uses its other hand to pin Gabriel’s chest down, metal fingers digging into the protective suit. He emits a static sound, almost a shush, as he takes one swift movement to slice Gabriel’s torso open. Efficient. He may have ascended beyond what he was, but the keen desire for clean, simple solutions remains. 

Gabriel’s scream eventually—eventually—dies out, and he is reduced to ragged breaths that barely keep him conscious. His vision blurs in colorful streaks of red and silver as he looks down at himself, at Hux, crouched over him like a night terror, those eyes cutting through the haze of pain to capture Gabriel’s attention. Like a God, he thinks. Like an ancient God too horrible and majestic to be taken in all at once, only visible in glimpses and dreams. It could be attributed to the blood loss, but Gabriel is certain that he’s right, and that if he could see Hux in full, the sight would be blinding. The crystalline peaks of Hux’s shoulder twinkles in the dim light, and his claw of a hand flexes on Gabriel’s chest, feeling for a heartbeat.

“Does it hurt?” Hux asks, so earnestly that Gabriel almost answers.

“...Get…fucked,” is all he says, through gritted teeth.

“It will be—will-be quick.” That static hiss again. He really does mean it, doesn’t he? This is comfort to a creature like him. “If not painless.”

Hux shifts his weight, replacing the clawed arm that holds Gabriel down with the flat of his blade and maneuvering his three-fingered hand to Gabriel’s midsection, studying the scene with the same curious, callous disregard as he did Dmitri’s death. Cautiously, he paws at the exposed entrails. Carefully, really. He exhibits less care when he contracts his metal fingers into a fist around the yielding mass of Gabriel’s liver, pulling it out and away from its home above his intestines in a single quick movement. The empty cavity it leaves behind begins to fill with bright red arterial blood in spurts timed to the metronome of Gabriel’s heart monitor, frantic beeping starting to slow. 

Gabriel no longer has the wherewithal to scream, and barely enough will to keep breathing, though he does try, watching in wonder as his diaphragm expands and contracts in the slick mess of his insides. And, above him: Hux, the thing that used to be HUX-A7-13, that ancient God, raising Gabriel’s liver to his mouth to eat.

It’s a troubled, awkward motion: Hux does not have a jawbone, and barely a mouth at all beyond the impression of teeth and tongue. To bite down means the painful reorganization of his bones and tendons into a new order, but he does it anyway, remaking himself around the pleasure of consumption. His jagged teeth tear into the warm organ, and his senses are instantly alight, aflame with the novelty of flavor. The meat is rich and metallic, so dense with nutrients that he doesn’t know what to do with it all, overwhelmed by sheer sensation. Some part of him that he birthed from himself can smell it, too, and the scent is cloyingly heavy, sitting in his sinuses with a weight that bears down on his tongue, on the taste he’s already experiencing, impressing upon it the depth and nuance of human life. No circuit could inform him of this particular ecstasy. It is his alone. He is the only living creature on this cursed speck of dust in the eye of Creation that can know how this feels.

Gabriel moans weakly beneath him, and Hux insistently presses his weight down on his steel arm to quiet the human. How can he possibly impart this? Gabriel might be an insect, and prolonging his pitiful life any further is pointless cruelty, but surely—surely he can try to tell him. Viscera drips from his mouth as he cocks his head down at Gabriel.

“Hux,” Gabriel pleads weakly, though he knows that it’s too late. Nobody can do anything for him now, not even Hux. He knows that the machine-thing is going to devour him and twist his genes into a shape more pleasing to it, that he’s going to be subsumed just like Dmitri and the rest into the glorious amalgam of flesh. Maybe that is the only way he can still be saved. His body won’t live—not in this condition, not with half of his entrails crudely spilled out onto the dirt—but some version of Gabriel Soma will. It’s not a comfort. It’s not even a distraction. All it does is make him more aware of Hux and what Hux is doing. Blood drips into his eyes, and as he tries to blink it away, he realizes that Hux has shifted again to place his bulk above Gabriel, and that he has stopped eating, discarding the leftovers of Gabriel’s liver carelessly in his chest cavity.

“This is growth,” Hux says, mouth hanging loose and bloody as the computerized core inside him composes the words. “Some—thing is growing from the—from the—from the im-per-fect—ion of this life.”

“Hux, please,” Gabriel whispers.

“And it will hurt. And it will be un-pleasant. But you, J15L19, ‘Gabriel Soma’, will be—will be per—fect.” Hux shivers and spasms in delight. “We will be perfect.”

Gabriel’s vision colors itself dark at the edges, until all he can see is Hux’s red gaze looking back at him, and he can almost imagine that those eyes are real. For a few moments, the only sound he hears is his own pulse slowing in his ears. He comforts himself with being useful until the end. He was not born to waste. He was not born to be wasted. Even here—

Hux’s digitized voice cuts through his fading thoughts, though Gabriel is too far gone to even process what he’s saying. It barely sounds like speech at all. All it is is a collection of disparate, clipped sounds, like a dial tone, like a hold signal, like…music, like music, like a melody Gabriel has never heard in this lifetime but nonetheless knows intimately. Each note is toneless, pure sound in the vague shape of instrumentation, but it’s there, and HUX-A7-13 sings Gabriel to sleep in his own voice.

Gabriel Soma’s eyes open to an unfamiliar sky.

He’s still on the ground, in the dirt, but this is not Dvarka, as the sky is bruise-black instead of pink and the foliage around his head is a muted green, ferns and fungi and other plants he vaguely recognizes from his time on Earth. This, however, is not Earth. The stars are all wrong. The brilliant constellations above him are strange and unfamiliar, far removed from the star charts he studied in his free time. Still, the matter quickly leaves his mind when he remembers the more pressing matters he has to deal with.

Gasping, Gabriel sits up, feeling his stomach with his hands even before his eyes can focus properly. All that he touches is the rough, taut fabric of his suit, unharmed and unblemished: no entrails, no blood, not even a hint of wear and tear. His hand grasps desperately at his left shoulder, and his left hand moves obediently when he tells it to. He can still feel the pain, cutting through levels of consciousness he’s never experienced, but no physical sign remains. 

As the panic slowly subsides, it’s replaced again with the quiet fear that comes when he realizes he is not alone in this place—this forest, stretching into the darkness as far as he can see. The clearing he’s in is lit by flickering firelight, casting shadows behind his body in vague shapes that claw at his peripheral vision. He holds his shoulder tighter, closer to himself, protective as he squints at the silhouette sitting beside the fire, their body also dancing in the glow. It’s a man, younger than Gabriel and completely unfamiliar, sloppily dressed in messy hair and business slacks. When he turns his head to look at Gabriel, his eyes are dark-ringed and wide beyond belief. After a moment, though, something like recognition sparks, and the man relaxes, sighing.

“First time?” he asks.