Slender fingers ran across the aluminum surface, which sat dilapidated and pockmarked by corrosion. The woman touching the metal panels could tell this wreck had been here a very long time, almost certainly longer than she had been alive. Even so, it seemed almost undisturbed: two long, nearly-flat panels that laid on the ground several meters away from each other, and the rear of the wreckage which was covered in dirty torn-up fabric which had long since started to decay, were both grown over with grasses and vining plants. Despite this, there were chunks torn out of some of the metal in the wreck as if it had been shot several times in several different places. Her eyes wandered from its surface to the ground cover. Green grass, small shrubs, and at the edge of this forest clearing, a thick wall of trees through which vision beyond a few meters was impossible. Her gaze returned to the debris, trying to discern what it had once been so many years ago. A wheel jutted from the side of it, about a meter in front of her. Tentatively, she stepped forward and reached out with a finger, spinning the wheel. "How long have you been here, I wonder," she asked the corpse in her subdued, silvery voice; she expected no answer, but to her surprise, one came.

"Probably since the war before the last one." This voice, in contrast, was strong and husky, with a slight Central Russian accent. "Looks like that type, anyhow," it added. Emerging from the treeline was a tall woman to whom the voice belonged. She was easily over two meters tall, and her snowy white hair - messy and loosely contained in a long, low ponytail by several hairties - nearly touched the ground. The woman by the wreck turned her head to look at the new arrival. "It's a plane, VHS."

"Is it?" The girl near the airplane wreckage responded, some annoyance in her voice. In contrast, she was relatively short - only around 160 centimeters tall, and with well-groomed long blonde hair; some of it was tied into a small braid that hung down her front, resting just over her heart. Unlike the other woman, VHS wore a loose black beanie cap, and on her forehead rested a pair of oversized sunglasses. "I was –"

"Tryin' ta figure it out yourself, I know, I know. Didn't think you'd get it any time soon, though. I've been watchin' ya for ten minutes now." The taller woman adjusted the oversized dark gray winter coat she was wearing; it was quite warm, especially with the brown faux-fur that lined the collar. If she was cold, though, she was wearing the coat the wrong way - it was left open to show her comparatively thin red keyhole t-shirt.

VHS didn't respond immediately, though her face scrunched up ever-so-slightly when she heard that the other girl had been watching her for ten whole minutes without saying anything. "I'm trying to figure out where it's from, too, before we tear it apart looking for salvage. Give me a minute, Maxim." VHS began to circle around the aircraft slowly, her hand on her chin; she, too, wore an oversized coat and left it open, though hers was a dark blue and much thinner than Maxim's, and decidedly much more fashionable with its lighter blue striping down the sleeves and yellow interior. Her own beige t-shirt was long enough to cover the pair of blue denim shorts she wore, and had the logo of a popular rapper on it - a penguin with the rapper's name in jagged red lettering. She kicked a rusty, pockmarked piece of broken metal away felt like a solid five minutes of woodland ambience passed, interrupted only by the hums and haws of VHS, who gave no answers or even guesses. A faded symbol that had once been proudly displayed on the fuselage of the plane - a white cross with a smaller blue cross inside, with a red circle in the center - must be important here, but…

"You lost for an answer?" Maxim asked, finally prompting VHS to look up at her.

"You talk like you know where this thing comes from."

"Well, 'course I do." Maxim's voice carried a not-so-subtle undertone of smug knowing, as if she had been enjoying watching VHS struggle to puzzle it out. "It's an airplane, yeah? One a' the ol' turboprop types."

"Sure. I can see that, though." VHS glanced towards the nose of the plane, cracked and cragged; small, straight bits of rusty steel jutted from the pointed nose cap, three in all equally spaced apart from each other. Each propeller blade was broken at some point along its length.

"So it musta come here," Maxim started, her cant as if she had been leading up to some big epiphany through an hours-long debate, "from the sky. Fell right out of it!" The tall woman tried to hold back her laughs, but instead just ended up snorting and breaking out into loud guffawing.

VHS, however, did not laugh, and her neutral expression remained unchanged. It wouldn't have been accurate to say that she had become accustomed to Maxim's jokes - they still annoyed her - but she had learned, at least, to take them in stride. "I could have told you that."

Maxim wiped her mouth with her sleeve. "Yeah, you coulda. But you didn't. 'Sides, you're a sharp cookie, I'm sure you noticed the, uh, marking there." She gestured with her hand towards the dilapidated marking on the aircraft's fuselage. VHS nodded affirmatively. "It's a Slovak marking from the Nineteen-forties, and given the type 'a plane this looks like –"

"Wait, you know the model, too? How?" The blonde girl's intonation gave her away as being more incredulous, as if she believed Maxim was playing another joke.

"Uh-huh. When you look into so much stuff about vintage motorbikes sometimes y'just come across articles about other kinds of vintage vehicles n' stuff. Learnin' through osmosis, I think they call it. Anyway, this thing used to be an Avia B-534. They made 'em back when the Czech Republic and Slovakia were just a single country. Guess now it's a pile of junk, though." She shrugged and sighed, running an open hand through her hair. "Man, it woulda been cool to hear that engine start up, though."

If VHS had not believed Maxim to begin with, she was at least slightly convinced now; the other girl's insistence on giving a straightforward and honest-sounding answer went a long way towards that. As she looked over the old Czechoslovak relic, her eyes fell upon the shattered glass of the canopy; it was empty, small vines and moss growing over the rusted instrument panels, the rough fabric of the seat having deteriorated over the years – Wait, she thought, that's not right. "Maxim, the cockpit's empty."

Maxim cocked an eyebrow. "Yeah, and? It's been here over a hundred years. Why's that a surprise t'you?"

"Doesn't that mean the pilot lived through the crash?" VHS asked, a dash of hopefulness added to her normally even voice.

Maxim shrugged. "Does it matter?"

There was a long, unbroken silence between the two that accompanied Maxim's answer, a silence that remained undisturbed for what felt like several minutes until finally VHS turned and began to walk in the direction of their destination; the steel carrion had simply been a detour in their way. Maxim followed closely behind her, and they walked in silence for several more minutes through the dense woods, swatting at the occasional swarm of gnats. Eventually, though, the sound of footsteps on grass and cracking twigs and crunching leaves grew dull; once more, it was Maxim who broke the monotony. "Awfully quiet, aint'cha?"

VHS cocked her head to one side, just enough to be noticeable. "Just thinking." That thinking, Maxim thought, was probably why they kept deviating from the patrol route by a few hundred meters every so often, only to slowly make their way back on course a short while later. VHS' mind tended to work like that - it'd wander within acceptably set parameters, but in doing so it often missed out on more efficient shortcuts or side paths that would lead to the destination quicker.

Maxim was the opposite. Taking shortcuts and strolling off the beaten path was her forte; sticking to predetermined plans and routes in both patrol and in thought process was a particular point of the many lectures she'd received from the Commander. "Maybe you'd like t' clue the rest of the class in on what's goin' on in your head?" VHS did not answer immediately, or even after hesitation. Maxim reached forward and grabbed her compatriot by the shoulder, shaking her with some vigor.

Of course, VHS turned around and shot a glaring, stern look up at Maxim. "Just what did you do that for? I answered you, didn't I?" Maxim grunted in the negative, and the shorter girl's expression softened. "Oh. Sorry. Well, I was just thinking. About, uh, the space exploration humans did in the mid-1900s."

Maxim began walking again, satisfied in her ability to force a conversation forwards for better or worse. "How'd you even get there?"

"What do you mean, 'how'd I get there'?" VHS replied, irritatingly mimicking Maxim's voice while copying her words. "I was thinking about the plane, right? Then to heavier-than-air travel, then to space travel, and then to humanity's endeavors in spaceflight."

"Uh-huh," Maxim sighed. "And… what about 'em? They happened, I guess."

"But don't you ever wonder why? That's the issue with you."

"I wonder why all the time. Like why you're wasting your time on this when we have somewhere to be. You keep wandering back and forth 'cause you're so lost in thought. C'n you at least think about this crap and stay on track at the same time?"

VHS opened her mouth to respond, but thought better of it. Initially she had thought to retort by saying thinking ate up none of their time, but Maxim, unfortunately, did have a point. If her being so lost in thought prevented them from arriving on schedule, that was a real issue, and she couldn't fault the other for being upset about that. She swallowed her pride and shut her mouth, stuffing her hands into her pockets. "Yeah, sorry." She turned around and recommenced her march along the narrow, grassed-over pathway. "Anyway, though. Why did they invest all that money and time into training, rocketry, astronomy, research in general –"

Maxim, seeing no point in allowing the conversational journey to meander, cut her off. "It was the cold war, Vee. The Old Soviet Union and America were enemies, n' bein' able to shoot a rocket with some stuff on it into space don't look too different from bein' able to shoot a missile with a nuke on it over the sea."

But unfortunately, Maxim had fallen for VHS' crafty trap. "That's what I was thinking, too. It seems perfectly reasonable, doesn't it? But I think I have a different explanation." As VHS took a deep breath to begin explaining, Maxim rolled her eyes and sighed, defeated. "I think the pilot of that aircraft - the crashed one we saw - was trying to reach God."

"He was a military pilot in a war. He wasn't some guy just cruisin' around at his own pace."

"All the better. Consider that the astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding discovered the galaxy NGC 7293 in the early 19th century. More colloquially, it's called the Helix Nebula, but it also has another name: the Eye of God."

"You can't be serious," Maxim said.

Ignoring Maxim, VHS continued on. "How many times have you heard of, or read about, people who never professed to any religion suddenly praying once they find themselves on a battlefield?" Allowing a pause just long enough for Maxim to open her mouth but not long enough for her to actually respond (to her annoyance), VHS cut her off and answered for her. "All the time, right? I don't think that's just a coincidence. I think it's natural for humans to try to connect with their creator. Just like it's natural for them to try to recreate Adam and Eve through their technology."

Maxim scoffed, and then found herself having to come to an abrupt halt as VHS had stopped just in front of her. To avoid walking into her and causing the both of them to tumble, she almost took a fall herself. "Hey! Next time tell me when yer gonna just stop in the middle of the – huh?" VHS had stopped, and over her shoulder Maxim could see a small, wooden cross dug into the grassy forest floor; the wood was rotting and had certainly been abandoned for a long time, but still it kept its same holy shape. Lying at the foot of the small mound of dirt at the base of the cross was what appeared to be a child's doll, its back leaning against the cross as if in rest while its cloth exterior decomposed and green moss had grown in patches over its surface. But still, it remained clearly recognizable as a doll. Maxim carefully trotted to VHS's side, whose usually neutral expression was one of silent reverence. They had stumbled upon hallowed ground, it seemed, and from the new angle Maxim could see that there was what was unmikastably a pistol, rusted and pitted though it was. There too was the molding and rotted leather of a pilot's headgear, along with cracked glass goggles, dark brown stains apparent on their overgrown surface even from a small distance. "A grave…?"

The once-vibrant colors of the doll's folk dress, its red and blue dyes eaten away by time, still remained recognizable as reds and blues. VHS cupped her hands together in front of her waist. "Dolls are a way for humans to try to create and return to Adam. To create things in their image that last longer than they do. In the same way, I think humans fly and reach out to space to try to find God. The dream of flight and the dream of the perfect doll have been part of humanity's collective efforts for as long as they've been on the planet." VHS knelt down in front of the grave, reaching into one of her coat's pockets, retrieving a small, black folding knife, its handle wrapped in a green camouflage-patterned paracord. She pressed a button on the handle which caused the black steel blade to flip open and lock in place with a click. Soon she was carefully cutting away the overgrowth from the cross.

Without thinking about it, Maxim found herself kneeling down next to VHS, helping her clean up the grave. She had never been a particularly reverent person, and on her own probably wouldn't have even taken the time to tidy up an old grave in the middle of nowhere for someone she didn't even know. For some reason, she thought, VHS' religious fervor had touched her in some way too. And, she told herself, she felt some affinity with whoever this person was. Perhaps it was her hobby of motorcycling, or her current occupation of 'hired gun'. Maybe that was what stopped her from interjecting when VHS begun to pray; maybe it was simply a preoccupation with not ruining the other girl's communion with the holy.

Pokoj vječni daruj im, Gospodine,

i svjetlost vječna neka im svijetli.

Počivali u miru.

Amen.

Maybe there's no reason for the world to go on, Emilia thought. And it's possible she had a valid point - several, even. The wars that had so violently dominated the mid-21st century left their scars upon the land, both visible and invisible. Places where the Earth was cratered only for the wounds upon her to be cauterized by the intense heat generated from a thermonuclear detonation remained, thankfully, few and far between. But the wars that rent the land combined with climate change and the new infectious diseases that swept across western Russia and eastern Europe - diseases with a near one-hundred percent mortality rate, and no known remedy other than never catching it at all - had ravaged the planet. Poverty was at an all-time high. Violations of human rights, even in former states that championed liberty, were commonplace. The world's population had been slashed by at least twenty percent.

Emilia's light, cautious footsteps were not loud enough to produce an echo in the hugely spacious commons area of the abandoned complex, even against its bare unfinished aluminum-alloy floor. In the dim light that filtered in through holes in the hull, she could see a large sign hanging from a wall to her north; the fastening on one side seemed to have failed in the wreck's years and the sign had slumped to one side. The English on the sign read 'Block 01 Recreation Area'; even with the rust that was eating at the edges of the sign, the bright red letters were visible with what little New Mexican sun shone into the hulk. Contrasting the red was the sheer blue-gray of every other surface around her, from the floors to the walls to the ceilings, lined with rivets and places where the sheet metal had been welded together. Some of the welds were unfinished, or had since failed in the years the structure lay wasting away. Many of the surfaces had the pockmarks of corrosion scattered across them. This particular room she estimated to be at least a hundred feet long, and twice as much wide.

With one foot through one of the sunbeams in her way, only the ghosts that were present could see clearly that she was olive-skinned. As the rest of her body passed through the light and back into the dinginess of her immediate surroundings, nobody else was present to see the instant in which her loose chestnut hair - of which one strand found itself jutting up from her head - nor her sharp and round eyes were visible. Her relatively dark clothing, consisting of a simple black tee shirt tucked into a pair of cargo pants patterned with desert camouflage, was somewhat more obscure against the gray background. She wore a dark grey backpack, just a bit worse for wear with holes and tears in its fabric, for carrying her necessities in and the computer hard drives she was after out. In her right hand, held by its center of gravity in the middle of the weapon, was a veritably antique firearm, wood-stocked and with a slight curve in its vertical top-mounted magazine. The silver steel of the weapon gleamed in the light like diamonds held up to starlight and cast reflections of that light onto the far wall that Emilia was approaching.

After making her way across the sizeable commons area for what felt like a year, she came to a narrow passageway on the eastern wall. The corridor, probably a maintenance passageway that had never been sealed up, was blocked off by a heavy piece of sheet steel that had fallen and twisted itself in front of her route forward. Emilia was something of a proud pessimist, and the large steel mass that had fallen through the ceiling above her did little to allay the sense of foreboding that each groan and crack of the metal under her feet sent straight to her core.

Emilia stood and stared at her obstacle for only a moment before she began to try to move the chunk of steel sheeting that blocked her way; this proved fruitless as it was simply too heavy for her to move. It was just when she was considering whether or not to turn back that her cell phone began to ring in her front right pocket. Its sudden vibration and maximum-volume ringtone - one she'd never bothered to change from the cold and jarring default one - almost made her jump a foot in the air, assured this would save her from falling to her doom. Not that it matters to me.

She reached into her pocket after overcoming the initial shock and removed the cell phone. A positively ancient model by the standards of the day, it was of the type that only had extremely rudimentary calling and text messaging functionality. However, this made them extremely cheap to acquire and use, and thus they could be considered disposable when operating with some measure of secrecy. She flipped its cover open and hit the green button with a silhouette of a phone handset on it, and through crackling interference Emilia could make out a familiar female voice in her ear.

"1918? Is that you?"

"Who else would it be?" Emilia replied through grit teeth. Her eyes narrowed and her hand clenched the phone tighter in her hand. "What do you want? I'm a little busy."

"Just checking on you," the voice answered defensively. "Wasn't sure if we'd have to reboot you from a backup. That place is ready to fall apart."

You're telling me. Emilia placed her free hand on her obstacle and shoved with all her might, grunting for just a moment. No dice. "Yeah, well, my way's blocked, Elle." She took particular relish in using that shorthand name for the woman on the phone, LMG-25. It may not have been her real name, but at least it wasn't as cold as renaming a person based on the weapon shoved into their hands. "I could use some of the explosives I brought to clear it, but…" she trailed off.

"Yeah, the Commander would really prefer if you didn't drop the whole place on top of yourself. I guess you could go through the hibernation block," Elle advised, "but it might be pretty unpleasant." Her voice sounded grim at that.

Emilia answered as if she were a child trying to impress other children during recess. "You think I've never seen a corpse before?"

"That's not what I mean, 1918." Emilia felt her hand clench tight around the phone again; she had to be careful not to break it at the hinges. She hated that 'name'. But Elle had a point. "Anyhow, it's really important you get those hard drives. Not just for the paycheck, either, but so we don't lose all that knowledge, either."

"Who's 'we'?" Emilia scoffed. "Nobody I care about doing anything I care to know about. I'd be willing to bet there's just engine tech they want to steal from the Americans on those drives. It'll just get put to use in missiles for the next war."

The static from the other end of the phone did not betray Elle's emotions, but when she answered Emilia it was obvious she was irritated by her bleak outlook. "I'm sure it's something more important than that."

One of the most annoying tendencies of human beings was that of building their sleeping places far away from their places of recreation, or so Emilia thought. The USS Providence's corpse was no more different from a human home in that regard. While the kitchens were right next to the commons area, the hibernation block was situated on the other side of the unfinished spacecraft, necessitating a journey from one end to the other, as well as up three stories. The incomplete nature of the construction combined with the ageing abandoned infrastructure meant that more than once Emilia had to take a detour around a longer corridor as well, either due to a blockage in her path or having no path at all. After all, the maps she had been provided were at least a decade old.

At times she encountered large gashes in the hull, torn open by the giant's fall onto the desert floor. Through them bright, almost blinding, sunlight streamed in, cutting through the darkness much more effectively and naturally than the compact flashlight Emilia had taken along with her. As she drew ever closer to the hibernation block, thick bundles of wiring and cables began to show themselves running their long paths on the walls like arteries through the body. Every so often a burst pipe's jagged edges caught on Emilia's clothes in the narrow hallway, and before she freed herself she would see the dark stains on the aluminum plating of coolant fluid. It was as if the great giant Providence's heart had exploded, and the titan's collapse had severed the vital pathways through its body that brought life-giving fluids to its brain and heart. Torn wires, some stripped of their insulation, reminded Emilia of gory scenes she had seen in horror movies. Each groan and creak of the metal under her feet made ice run through her body, even though the temperature inside the Providence was baking-hot. In a way, she felt some sympathy for the derelict colossus.

More than sympathy, however, she felt insulted. Angry. That people would give a noble name to an inanimate spacecraft and take hers away - as if the weapons she and countless others had placed in their hands were a more valuable identity than their thoughts and feelings and hopes and lies and lamentations and joys and their everyday struggles in the post-war world. But that's just how people were - they personified the inanimate, made it divine, and dehumanized the animate to serve as an emotional buffer for when it was eventually destroyed by their own hands. The Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Romans, the Greeks, the French and the Chinese and the Egyptians and the Americans - they had proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt. A nation mourned over the loss of the Providence, and they would a hundred years from now; nobody mourned anymore for the dead of the Punic Wars. Nobody mourned when Elle's first body had died, least of all the humans.

So lost in thought was Emilia that when the ground did gave way underfoot, she didn't know what was going on until she was already falling. And once she was, she could do nothing but scream her anger into the blackness of the Providence's belly.

She hit the ground in the midst of a terrible crashing and scraping, the sound as if a beast was tearing the giant Providence to shreds with titanium claws. After a cursory check of her systems, she found she had miraculously avoided being impaled on any pieces of metal, and was quite grateful that her backpack had mostly broken her fall. She groped around in the dark until she felt her flashlight, to her relief, and switched it on. There was very little ambient light that made its way down here. Noting her weapon lying on the floor several meters from where she landed, she got to her feet, swaying uneasily, and then took in her surroundings.

The same blue-gray unfinished metal walls surrounded her, though this room was much longer than the commons area and stretched beyond her flashlight's useful range. She cursed the cheapness of procurement at Griffin, and looked around herself in a slow circle.

By pure happenstance, she had managed to drop right into the Hibernation block. Dozens of cylindrical metal tubes, resembling open coffins with their glass lids all ajar, lined the relatively narrow walls. They were just about two meters long and a meter wide, and heavy, thick bundles of cable ran from them into protective steel piping that ran up to the ceiling and stopped where the wires were exposed.

More jarring than the hibernation pods to Emilia, which she was fully expecting, were the corpses sitting in aluminum chairs next to several of the pods. Upon sweeping her flashlight over the floor near each pod she could see, she found that there were plenty more of these corpses in unnatural positions, as if tossed violently to the ground. It was apparent, almost immediately to Emilia, that none of these were human cadavers. For one, they had not rotted at all - unlikely over more than a decade, even in the midst of the New Mexico desert. But more jarring to Emilia were the wires hanging from torn-off limbs and the gleam of metal joints and alloy bones bursting through artificial skin. Patches of dried liquid coolant and hydraulic fluid where the heads had been cracked open and limbs had been ripped off by the Providence's fall gave the ghastly appearance of grievous, gory wounds, and in Emilia it triggered the same innate feeling to look away - to shut her eyes - that a human might feel when looking upon their own kind in this state.

Willing her feet to move took more than one try, but eventually Emilia started to walk forward through the tomb of so many just like her. Her eyes found themselves checking her immediate pathway every few seconds so as to avoid debris or parts of the broken dolls in the room; deep inside of her there was a profound sense of revulsion, as if she wanted to vomit. The compulsion to run away from the vantablack that swallowed the beam of light from her flashlight nearly overwhelmed her. Her footsteps became careful and calculated, as if she were afraid of making too much noise; she couldn't help but feel like a graverobber.

The air, stale and dry, smelt of the ancient death that lingered in crypts. Emilia couldn't be sure that she wasn't just imagining it. Having lost track of time, it seemed to take a great deal longer to reach the end of this room towards her destination than to get here; this was especially because every so often, Emilia passed a doll whose eyes were still open. They either lay face-up on the floor, staring towards the steel ceiling, their vision stopping there and never viewing the stars they sought to reach, or they gazed at the steel that they lay upon, bearing witness to their grave forever. It was almost too much to take.

Though much debris and the body of at least one inactive Doll lay in the doorway to the central computer core room, nearly entirely blocking the wide doorway, Emilia steeled herself as best she could and climbed over the pile. Thrice her clothing snagged on the remains of the Providence, and once she almost tumbled down the pile. Still she made it over the mess and down into the skull of the Providence after having navigated its Heart, and so she gazed upon its Brain.

A massive tower of technology made up the center of the room. Monitors took up much of the space on the walls, and ports of various inputs consumed much of the space that was not taken up by a screen. To say the rough cylinder in the center of the room was made of computers would be both a massive understatement and the best simplification Emilia could make. All sorts of machines, untouched for a decade, made up the mass. She did her best to approach it. In a way, she felt like it was a distant relative to her, and an eerie sensation crept over her.

She knelt down next to one of the terminals on the mass of servers, with wires running through its center like a vital artery bringing blood to the rest of the body. After carefully examining several of the terminals - which had been arranged in a ring - she blew the dust off one of the ports on its front, scattering the long years of filth into the air. Emilia took off her backpack and removed a small device with a cable attached - a specially-made hard drive that would send just enough power into the server device to pull the data from its hard drive. There was a simple, rudimentary screen attached so that she would at least have some idea of what she was working with. With a feeling like a child doing something she knew she would be scolded for, she plugged the device into the Providence's computer terminal. The handheld hard drive's screen flickered to life - a bit unconvincingly - and the data began to scroll by like lightning. Simultaneously, through a wireless link with the hard drive, she began to copy it into her own body as a layer of redundancy just in case the device failed or was broken or stolen on her return trip.

Emilia had no way to be prepared for what she experienced. How could she? How could a Doll who cursed fate, who cursed God, and most of all cursed Humanity - prepare herself for the long list of the names of corpses that lay in the previous room? And contrary to Emilia's beliefs - her understanding of Humanity, that the expendable were numbers and not names to them - they were names. Vanessa. Lucille. Sarah. Katrina. Victoria. September. Maria. Isolde.

In addition, she was taking on much of those doll's own memory logs as data now. The Humans worshipped the Providence as a God, and these dolls as extensions of it; as their caretakers, their shepherds on their journey into the deep blackness. Per aspera ad astra. A hard job for the Dolls, but they were cared for, and loved. They were given names, and treated well, and their opinions considered, and respected: and in the end, they helped the humans escape the failing Providence. It was then that she realized that she had been far too harsh on humanity for a long, long time, even though they had stolen her name away. She did not know why this data was important to her employer, but it had been more important than expected to her personally.

It was a long time before Emilia stood, even after the small beep from her portable hard drive informed her that the transfer was done. Even after she knew it intuitively as the memories stopped flowing into her. While she had not experienced them firsthand, reading the logs had given her more than enough context. Was her viewpoint flawed? She couldn't be certain. And despite the many years she had ascribed malice to humanity, she wondered if they weren't just trying their best. Deep down, she knew they always had been. That people were imperfect creatures. That was why they built things like the Providence and the Dolls; to outrun and outlive their imperfection. To start over elsewhere.

Emilia began to navigate her way out of the Providence. Though the entire experience shook her to her core, she thought deeply as she trekked back through the hall of Doll corpses. Perhaps the Humans were not wrong in labelling the Providence a sort of god. It was, after all, designed to reach out into what they called the heavens. Though it failed, the crypt managed to light a spark in the long-dark Emilia. To make the world itself a better place; that was many of those girls' wishes. She felt obliged to carry their last wish with her.

Perhaps that was the meaning in the world she had been looking for for so long.

"Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie