A form stands at the very edge of Baitan.

Five light sources burn above him, a child’s body supernaturally still in perceptions of his universe.

Black hair unnaturally dark, impossibly blue eyes hued with the color of a vibrant sky far flung from the great wastes. A human face of pale skin uncannily lifeless, his dead expression drawn across a cold skeleton in the failings of thought. Clothing salvaged from ancient sources, a bandolier of clear vials and abyssal black syringes hung across faded leather and thick cloth.

Eyes stare into the horizon, processors burning as the being observes the dying district before him. Thoughts born of quantum states, a soul created in forgotten foundries hidden within the world itself. 

The taste of wasteland air is analyzed as particulate falls upon sensors, a tiny sample of dust added to a database of a hundred billion others.

Small grains of sand, brought by prevailing wind currents from the deserts thousands of miles away, are isolated from a concoction of gaseous hydrocarbons. A study on the state of the district done at its very edge, the pulse of an inconceivably large creature felt in the most subtle of its unnatural movements.

The finality of life.

A beheaded body convulsing in the final electrical impulses of a broken spinal column; a survival instinct grasping the last figments of a passing existence. World lungs bring the patterns of particle decay from the north, blood vessels circulate the unquenchable power of a burning core a hundred million miles away, and a vast heart beats the silence of a dead race.

A single imperfection within one grain of sand is detected; an imperceptible flaw produced in the manufacturing of the world preserved against the passage of time.

The memory returns uninvited; a history of thousands of years flooding back into the consciousness.

Utter annihilation.

The created soul stands upon the precipice of a distant cliffside. An artificial sky blotted out from the shapes of extermination vessels, the world beneath them red hot in the midst of a systematic fusion bombardment. 

Lances of plasma fire arc from the valleys below, gravimetric shielding reacting to incoming projectiles as burning lines of conflict are stopped cold at hulls.

The sound, engineered in the application of terror, shakes the very earth beneath their feet. A shrill tone heralding an apocalypse; streams of kinetic warheads falling from the vessels above.

Death incarnate, atomic payloads released upon defensive emplacements in the abortion of newly born suns.

Rubbled cities reduced to glass in a lost crusade. A purpose…

Five point seven nine nanoseconds pass, a universe of a billion imperfect emotions pushed through quantum processors like an ocean drawn through a straw. A logic loop caught in repetition, a thousand threads of thought drowning the soul.

He stands in the Garden.

Feet planted on soft dirt and surrounded by vibrant green grasslands. Broken clouds slowly trotting across a pale sky, an endless horizon meeting with rolling hills and crystal blue lakes. A single breeze sends waves of plant life surging across it, the cool air of the created world breathed in the virtual mind.

A moon hangs above, joined in kind by a single, brilliant golden sun.

The image of a facsimile, burned into permanent memory. Untouchable, an aspect of the core psyche as fundamental as the very strings of creation.

He dreads the association, he dreads the immediacy of the next.

Tears.

The tears are real; here, in this place. A cascade of software at the emotion, the stoppage of thought at the final memory. 

The Garden burns; grasslands razed in viral fire and lakes choked with sulfuric scrap code.

The Being snaps from his trance, a massive mind crashing into present reality. A created soul ripped back into its current existence, a full diagnostic executed in the panic of sudden self-awareness.

Software returns massive error states, blocks of programming logic ruined in sectors of hunter-kill-burn scars. Entire swaths unsalvageable, a perfect mind fragmented and ruined beyond comprehension. Flaws ignored, recognized as processors return to the present task.

The taste of air analyzed and scent of humanity felt, the trials of a civilization growing against itself. Ears listen as waves travel from great desert wastelands, eyes wide as the visual range opens to watch the bending of light against the upward curvature of the district.

He understands it all: a symphony from across the world, five beacons ignited in the desert.

Five fragments for their kind, for their…

“If you cannot promise it to them…” She smiles as she says it, those words now pushing past the memories and into a present mind. “Make a promise to me, for your own salvation.”