After a night of heavy rain, the horizon's gentle curve became visible to Prussia one morning after a nearby city's heavy smog was cleared. The lenses in his crimson light eyes focused on the 3D holographed adverts as they powered down for the day. Hatches on the walls of black skyscrapers swished open with vendors, both human and machine, behind them. They were ready to sell goods, which varied from manufactured food to complex machinery, to involuntarily modified slaves. Drone traffic increased and the air was filled with the screams of jet engines and long flames from the thrust nozzles of rockets.

Prussia's eyes refocused, zooming out from telescopic mode. The adverts, vendors and drones faded into dots in the distance. Prussia was standing 20 miles away from the city, and with his eyes out of focus, all he could see were skyscrapers and wasteland. But he could still hear the engines just as clear. A feeling of isolation crept into his wire-tangled head.

Feeling isolated was nothing new to him. When humans and nations alike began to forget about him, he had nobody to turn to except for machines and the finite company of Gilbird, his yellow feathered companion. Even his brother, Germany, showed him the door.

"It'll be best for all of us if you accept your fate. I can leave you to fade away in peace, if you like," Germany said solemnly while showing him to the open rear passenger door of a black BMW in front of an expensive hotel in Frankfurt. He looked at Prussia, expecting some extremely loud egotistical back talk in a futile attempt to save his existence and not be completely forgotten. Yet Prussia said nothing until he was seated in back of the car.

"You're wrong, Germany," he said while his lips curled upwards, "even when the name of my last believer has been mentioned for the last time," he paused, leading Germany to believe he was contemplating what to say next, "and in the future, we will meet again." By then, Prussia's voice had grown menacing, "Take me home," he said to the driver.

"Goodbye," said Germany sadly as the car pulled out into the main road.

"See you soon," said Prussia.

Prussia never faded away. Instead, piece by piece, organ by organ, he replaced himself to stay alive. Even his emotions became a series of algorithms within his new digital brain. All the while when he hid away in a cocoon of wires, the world went through reform after reform.

Nations started to disappear because humans no longer needed them.

"Do you think you'll find Germany in this city?" Asked Gilbird, perching on Prussia's shoulder.

"If I don't find him here, I'll keep searching," said Prussia in his new deeper auto-tuned voice that caused vibrations like a bass drop. With that, Prussia began to stride forwards to the city.

"How long have you been searching for him?" Said Gilbird curiously.

"I can't remember how long. You know that," replied Prussia. Perceiving time was difficult without a means to measure it, and without having to worry about mortality.

The entrance gates to the city towered overhead and dotted with lasers that turned from left to right rhythmically. Green lasers meant go. Red lasers meant wait. Lanky vicious officers in reflective masks directed people, who were mostly mutated humans, through the queues. The gates were sentient and more qualified than the officers to manage a crowd and determine who not to let in. The officers' job was just to assist the gates by breaking up fights and purging the mutants that were denied entry after waiting hours in the mile-long zigzag queue space. Prussia was not the only metal humanoid waiting to enter the city. But the tatty ancient blue military uniform he wore made him stand out. Most robots and transhumans never bothered with wearing clothes. His telescopic eyes began to focus in and out of the distant gates while the miniature cameras on his head tried to decipher how many people were waiting in the queue in front of him. A green warning flashed on the heads up display in front of the eye lenses, telling Prussia that there were too many people to count.

The bustling market was not the only reason why the city had so many visitors. Many of the mutants were also travelling to the spaceport to be transported for work on an offworld location. With Gilbird still on his shoulder, Prussia could see some of them lugging huge mining drills that were long enough to be barely man-portable. Some were also carrying stained diamond cutters the size of truck tyres.

When Prussia reached the front of the queue, he could feel the heat from the red lasers on his shoulders. The gate's camera, radar and microchip scanner worked in unison to identify Prussia, and soon loaded up the information from Prussia's microchip from the gate's huge database. Gilbert Beilschmidt. Y/N It communicated directly into the microchip in his head. Prussia selected Y using his brain which caused the gate to bleep. The red hot lasers switched to room temperature green, allowing him and Gilbird to enter the city.

Prussia had barely walked a metre into the city before he was jostled about by people carrying machine parts and information chips. A 3D printer clunked into life in a smelly cafe's terrace beside him. It was printing brown sludge using brown ingredients in it's cartridge, and an air vacuuming drone picked up the sludge to bring it to tables. But Prussia walked on, he had no need for food anymore.

He pushed his way through the crowd in search for the internet, as he did in every city or town he travelled to. "I'm gonna be rich!" Shouted a pubescent mutant, before pulling out a pistol from the front pocket in his jacket and shooting himself in the temple in with a loud pop. Blood and brains splattered the hard ground, which turned a few heads. A cleaning crew of yellow cubic robots slid up to the scene to clean up the mess while an officer looked on. Prussia figured that he must be close to the internet, because the internet often convinces the foolish to act foolishly.

His heads up display recognized the internet at a table not far from the mutant's corpse, so his brain allowed it to use his leg joint motors to home in on it. With no queue, Prussia sat in front of the internet at an aluminium table. The glow of the internet made the numbers in the heads up display difficult to read, so he ignored them. The internet's constant buzzing made peoples' conversations difficult for his ears to tune into, but he didn't let that bother him. "Ludwig Beilschmidt. Likes to be called Germany," said Prussia firmly. The internet's glow turned from yellow to orange as dimensions twisted around the internet's reach. It scoured space and deep into the past, through black boxes and databases and memory banks located throughout the city for any sign of Ludwig Beilschmidt passing through. Perhaps it would spot him through facial recognition in a surveillance camera, or a strand of DNA left in a bathroom. Maybe a payment in a bar in the name of Ludwig Beilschmidt.

As the internet searched, Prussia pulled his wallet from his inside pocket using the electromagnet on the palm of his hand. He prepared for the internet to tell him NOT FOUND, where he would then say, "thanks anyway," then give the internet some money and expect it to say TRY SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE HEAD. THAT MIGHT HELP.

But instead, the pumping speed of Prussia's machine of a heart increased for a fraction of a second when the internet told him FOUND. "Where?!" Prussia demanded, standing up so fast that he caused the cheap chair he was sitting on to fall over. SPACEPORT. SINGLE TICKET TO KUIPER BELT. TIME NOT FOUND.

"So it can't tell us when he brought his ticket? That sucks," said Gilbird, still perching on Prussia's shoulder.

Prussia remained speechless for roughly 10 seconds until something in his head jumpstarted. "We need to get to the spaceport," he said firmly, "we're going to the Kuiper Belt."