One: Waiting
It opened its eyes. Symbols it didn't recognize zig-zagged their way across its vision, mirroring the snowflakes falling around it. It could distinguish shapes in the snow, shadows that slowly inched, crawled, rolled, and dragged themselves towards it. They moved to the rhythm of the red light at the top of its head. It stood-no, it tried to, but it didn't have arms, or legs, or even a body. It was merely a head; a cold, dying head in the middle of the arctic, its twitching limbs scattered about it the snow.
Time passed. Well, maybe time passed, and maybe no time passed at all. Regardless of how long it took, it waited. That was all it could do. That was almost all it knew. It knew how to wait, and it knew that it had to find something. It had to find the boy. Didn't it? Or did it want to find the boy? Yes, it wanted, and even though something in its head said no, it couldn't want, it wanted. It wanted to have its arms and legs back and it wanted to stand up and it wanted to be warm and it wanted to return to the boy and it didn't want to be moving just yet because the self-repair protocols hadn't finished yet.
Wait. Yes, yes, it was moving. Its field of view shifted, and suddenly, it was far above its arms and legs and partially-reassembled body. It shifted again, and now it faced another human, the first human it had seen in one-hundred and thirteen-point-three-seven-eight planetary cycles (or maybe it had only been moments?). This human was operating a vehicle, like the ones that had hurled pointed metal things at it and made its back and chest hurt. Those memories were bad. They triggered its defensive protocols, only it couldn't engage its defensive protocols because its self-repair protocols hadn't finished yet. It felt itself descend and then it stopped moving, and soon after that, it was dark.
When it could see again, it was still dark, but not as dark as it had once been. It could feel its body beneath its neck, the ground beneath its feet. But it could not move. It was hungry, so hungry, but it could not move. Its vision was fading and the symbols that danced about in the darkness did so frantically and yet rhythmically, flashing red and white and growing and shrinking. Then it was dark again.
Author's note: This is my first real work of writing published for an audience this wide, so please feel free to leave a review!