Dedicated to ArmedWithAPen, to aid in her search for Terminator-fic, and in appreciation for her own story composed in the second-person, which partially inspired this one. Many thanks!


The machine has made you a paradox.

Your senses are sharp, sharper than they used to be, in your life before, when you drowned them in a fog of alcohol after the weight of guilt settled in your chest. They've been liberated by the machine and fine-tuned by this future world's devil of a computer since, but they've become muted, somehow.

You feel the heaviness in your joints, like lead in your bones, as if there's always some inertia to be overcome, with every movement.

You can feel it in the deepest reaches of your mind, in the murky, wordless tangles of synapses that spoke directly to your blood and your nerves and knew them more intimately than the breath knows the lungs, the part of you that cries havoc over this great divide.

You feel the desert wind, the rain, the quick nips of the sand bullets and the sudden cold embrace of a weeping cloud, it's true, but the sensations are slow in the coming, dull, as if all the rawness and life had been sifted out of them.

You hear the gritty hisses of the night breezes and the roar of the flood assaulting the ground, but there's a subtle artificiality to the sounds that you hate, that foaming white noise at the edge of hearing.

You smell the ionized scent of the water rising off of the baking dust, but you always catch a whiff of metal, with every breath, no matter where you are.

It's like there's a veil between you and the rest of the world, a filter. That was one of the reasons you thought this was a nightmare at first, purgatory.

... you're still not sure it isn't purgatory, of a sort. Penance.

Lord knows you deserve it.


So this is what you've come to be. The uncertain, guilt-haunted soul of a dead man, shielded in iron and clothed in a lying skin, stronger than you'd ever dreamed, more isolated than you'd ever fathomed. Half invulnerable.

Like you said. Paradox.