Tango walks down towards the tunnel that they had entered from the night before, his heavy steps ringing out against the stones as he looks at the place around them. What happened here while he was gone?

 

‘While he was gone…?’ He repeats the question in his mind.

 

The giant looks at his hands as he walks forward, the hydro-mechanical pistons in the joints of his body hissing with each step that he takes. No. He was never really gone, he was asleep. But they are gone now. All of them. Everyone. Everyone he had ever known is lost to time immemorial. All that remains of them are some ruins and the memories that can’t even flash before his mind’s eye anymore. He has no such thing as a mind’s eye now. It was sacrificed. But he knows what they looked like. What they sounded like. What they smelled like. Even if he can’t visualize or ‘manifest’ any of those senses, he knows that he knew them.

 

The wind howls louder now as they approach the cylindrical tunnel. The lights shine from the front of his body towards the pristinely smooth stone-walls.

 

A plasma weapon did this. This tunnel. He’s sure of that. It must have come from something giant. It wasn’t one of their own, it couldn’t have been. They never had anything this powerful. Well… No, that isn’t entirely true. He knows that. But they never had anything this precise down here on the ground. He steps out into the cylindrical tunnel and looks towards the left, towards the direction opposite from the one they had entered from before.

 

  Zooming in his vision a little further to look beyond the darkness, he sees it. The snow storm dissipates for only a brief second. The light of the bright moon above bounds off of the white world outside. His gaze follows the tunnel all the way down to its end. The tunnel, the hole. It doesn’t just go through this mountain cliff. It goes through the next precipice, a full rocky range over, and then through the one behind that as well. Like the lance of an arch-angel, the hole goes on for as far as his vision can see, from here to the distant horizon. The snowstorm pulls back in, drawing the curtain shut.

 

What happened here while he was asleep? Did they lose the war? They must have. Everyone he had known died and all the while he was asleep. He wants to feel angry about that. But it won’t let him – the hard-wiring of the suit, of the TANGO-Unit.

 

Could he have stopped it?

 

His gaze returns to the giant scarring wound that they stand inside of; the clean blast that must have emerged from nothing less than a leviathan. Some distant horror of the far-gone past. No. No he couldn’t have stopped it then. If he could have, then any of the others could have as well. But… somehow, even if they lost, people survived. Somehow they seem to have retaken the surface from the reavers. The heavy-encroacher that was down there with him must have been there since his own time, walking over the corpses in their shared tomb. It was the only facility left, if his scanner was any indication. That means that he is the last one. The last of his kind.

 

How many of the reavers are left? The things that the girl calls ‘bots’. Surely, there couldn’t be that many if there are villages of people, if there are cities, if humans had reclaimed the land. Should he still go then, to Sarajevo? Should they? Does any of this even need to happen?

 

What about the girl? She’s clearly some kind of hybrid. Some… mutant. Nothing like anything that existed in his day, he’s sure enough of that. But it isn’t too shocking for him either, that he could accept the fact of her existence. After all, the first drawings of human-animal mixtures were already done in the pre-neolithic times. Humanity is very familiar with the concept.

 

But is it some kind of genetic mutation? The rad-fragments do damage genetic material, not too badly if you only passed them by. But how many had been scattered throughout the world? Hundreds of thousands, millions more likely. They must have gone everywhere from the war. Everything on the planet must have been exposed to a constant stream of radiation. Apparently some wires got crossed. He bet the Internet would have gone wild. Well, they’re all dead now. Is the world better off because of it? Hard to say. Probably yes, though.

 

He looks down the passage again. That way leads to the north. He looks down the way they had come in from. That way leads south. He needs to go south. He needs to get to Sarajevo.

 

– Doesn’t he?

 

That’s what this body is for, after all. That’s the whole spiel of the TANGO-Unit, which he is now in charge of. He is the last one left, the last human of that era. Isn’t it his job then to put an end to this, once and for all? His responsibility? His duty?

 

Everyone is dead except for him. The war is over, by all accounts. Is there even a point then? Or is it just the hard-wiring of the body that is messing with his mind?

 

The goal of the mission… It is still there, waiting for him, for anyone. The sensors tell him that it’s still active after all these years. Floating there above Sarajevo, waiting for anyone to come and to call for it. It’s waiting for him.

 

The wind blows the standard issue jacket that is still hanging from his shoulder around and it catches his attention, as he looks at the fabric flowing around himself like a flag of a ship that had been lost at sea generations ago.

 

They, his people, had been here in this mountain hole. They tried to take it back, the facility. They tried to get to him while he was asleep. It’s his duty to honor that sacrifice, no matter how long ago it might have been. People died for him to get here and he is here now.

 

He’s going to do it, decides Tango. It’s waiting for him in Sarajevo.

 

And the girl?

 

The ‘dress’ blows around as well, as the icy wind coats his body. He listens to the sounds of her quiet breathing through the audio sensors that are still available to him inside of the cabin. Occasionally she would twitch in her sleep and kick the walls. That’s a familiar sound that makes him nostalgic, but the feeling of warmth doesn’t come with it as it might have once done in his old, human body.

 

– He needs her.

 

Time had worn the TANGO unit down to a dangerous level. It’s more than a miracle that it still works at all. How many years had it been since the war? Since he was told to sleep for routine maintenance by that kind face that put him into this mechanical shell? Decades? Centuries? More? The internal clock stopped working a long time ago. It’s really nothing short of a miracle of heaven itself.

 

God bless those Swiss engineers, wherever their souls now rest. All those years of working on clocks really paid off in the end, he supposes.

 

He can’t waste that. That sacrifice.

 

He needs the girl to keep him running. She seems desperate. He can use that. He isn’t sure if she is incredibly spoiled or just close to feral and very naive, he assumes the latter, given her appearance. Is everyone like that these days? Or is she an exception?

 

It doesn’t matter. He needs her. He would never make it to Sarajevo otherwise. Besides, she’s young, small and impressionable. She’s willing to listen to him and she’s willing to get hurt. He can use that too. Her body can withstand the cabin’s radiation for a long time, especially since it is everywhere here in the world now anyways. Assuming he gets her pepped up a little.

 

It’s an odd feeling though. She reminds him of someone who is dead now. The sensation is a little conflicting. But the hard-wiring of the bot’s core-purpose supersedes any emotions like that, overwriting any parts of him that it doesn’t need – anything that hinders the mission.

 

‘The city’, huh? He wonders what cities are like these days. He had always hated the city. It was always so noisy there. Air pollution was a big problem too. He turns to the north and begins walking. He needs time to get her ready, he needs time to get the critical systems inside the TANGO-Unit repaired and so, she has to learn how to do that and how to pilot the suit.

 

That is the final safety net. The Sarajevo protocol can’t complete without the TANGO-Unit and with a qualified pilot inside of it. And the world was fresh out of those, so he’ll just have to make one himself.

 

The storm howls. It will still be a while until it stops. He stands at the precipice, watching the world fly by outside. His mind and body are disconnected from each other in more senses than one, as the girl, in her troubled sleep, kicks around inside of him.

 

He ponders if this is how his wife had felt back then, when she was with child. It’s strange, having something inside of you, moving around. Freudian. Or was Gigeresque the word? He doesn’t know, he wasn’t a psychologist. He was never supposed to be here to begin with. Although he supposes those aren’t things anymore, those words, those professions, they both belong to the old world, to the dead people. Things are just strange now. But perhaps they always had been. It is what it is.