IMPERIUM
P Versus NP
Her brother stares at her from the vent.
No, this is another little boy. She can see that now. They look nothing alike beyond the mussed blonde hair and wide eyes. They are the kind of eyes that take in everything all at once, eyes only the innocent can have. Reaching for his hand, she makes promises. She will make everything okay. She promises herself.
She wants to kill him. Doctor Gavin Archer. Relaxing her finger against the pistol trigger is a moment encapsulated in the molasses slow drip of distorted time, a split second battle between fury and morality. It leaves her drained. Her head spins dizzy oxygen-deprived circles and her right knee quivers for a moment before the pistol cracks against his skull.
Her mother is taking another late shift. There are dark shadows pressed beneath her eyes and the skin around her cheeks looks deflated. She sees this and wants to say something mean to her mother. She wants to know when she can live a normal life like the other colony kids. Her friends are waiting for her. The fabric of her mother's uniform disappears out the door and she says nothing.
The vent is empty and it feels like an armor-piercing round catching her in the chestplate. Iron bands constrict around her chest, air sputtering out of her lungs.
Her brother is in the corner and he is silent as his fingers fit pieces of circuitry together. Tech runs in the family and at five he is a mechanical genius. His tech proficiency far eclipses his stilted vocabulary. He is smiling at her as the rudimentary omni-tool glow illuminates the bland walls of their prefab home. He is laughing, his joy finding outlet outside of verbal communication. When he grins, she can see the dark space where his baby tooth has fallen out.
The square root of 906.1 equals 30.1.
She fights the Alliance soldiers who pull her from the suffocating debris. She tries to send a voltage of energy through their bodies with her make-shift omni-tool. Blue light flickers as their kinetic shields fail. Metal presses a cool kiss into the flesh of her neck and there is a bite before the ash and smoke dissolve into total darkness.
The light is blinding, a gash of angry red searing through the haze of smoke. The shuttle vaporizes instantly.
He hates loud noises and the world around them is deafening. A small hand trembles in hers and she knows he is crying but she can't hear anything. She knows he is hurt but she can't think about that when the door slides open and a batarian walks into their living room.
He is telling her that she can't save him. For a mad second she wonders if he is even real. She wonders if she is trapped within a purgatory of conflict, reliving the past. Char and powdered concrete cake her tongue, tasting like dust and death.
Because she can't do anything else, she jokes. The idea of children touches on a place that never fully healed. Mindoir was something she didn't share with anyone. Standing here, she regrets that. Her glove brushes against his scarred mandible and in a terrible instant she realizes this dream he has laid out is exactly what she wants.
It is so pale against the rubble. White like the heirloom dishes her mother kept in a chest tucked in the corner of her closet. Cool, porcelain cool, as she presses it into her feverish palm. She clutches the small hand in her own.
It is an enigma. Humanity and its imperfections.
I am eternal. Immortal. I comprehend more about the physics of the universe than any living being has ever imagined.
These memories plague me in the manner of a problem for which there are infinite solutions, an unsolvable equation filled with unknown variables and written in the language of chemical interactions simulating the sensations of pain, happiness, and sorrow.
Theoretically, the concept is simplistic. In practice, emotions are beyond my full understanding.
Beyond the core motivations mapped out through the sacrifice of the woman I once was, there is this dissonance between my former self and what I am now.
I seek out these unknowns.