Exemption

SEQUENCE 1: THE SCAVENGER

     In the suffocating darkness, a scavenger traversed the tunnels of the old world. Facilities and bases, labyrinths of long steel corridors intertwined, lined with the divine, exotic technologies laid dormant, waiting for their cognizant masters to return. If not, what else would their purpose be? Purpose was impossible to find in the remnants of a dead world. A thousand, a million years would pass, yet they would still be found wanting.

     The scavenger envied them. For once, if he thought hard enough, he might remember what purpose used to consume much of his time. Even now, the notion of feeling for objects inanimate seemed odd. However, if his time spent travelling through ruins had taught him anything, it was to pay respects to all things animate or not. For he knew once what it meant to be crafted, sculpted for a grand purpose, only to be thrown away after use.

     Somehow, the thought of that angered him. The scavenger allowed the feelings to flow through his body; perhaps it would allow him to see the lost memories. But time and apocalypse had weathered him terribly - he could not even remember much of the day before, let alone the hours. His capacity for thought held only room for today, for the moment at hand. Even now, he did not quite understand what he was doing here.

     In search, for the last one.

     The last one.

     What was it? Food and water? No, he hadn't required sustenance for quite some time now, although the reason for which still escaped him. He was no longer human, something more, but sometimes less. Each step he took through the pitch blackness, he could feel every inch of rusted pipe, of the pulsating energy running throughout the forgotten wires, his senses attuned as if his very skin pushed itself against the walls and encompassed the whole of the environment around him. His eyes, his ears, were redundant, obsolete organs that were simply artifacts of the physical form he took.

     The electricity pulsated at regular intervals, the heartbeat of machines enticing his every step. Despite its tone, the days that dragged his spirit down, he could feel it growing in strength. And in the still Earth, the age of silence forever, any change in the pattern, of eternal tranquility, meant the presence of something capable of change.

     Life.

     The journey was coming to its end. Compared to the extraordinary amount of time the scavenger had spent on this planet and the next, and all the ones humanity had pulled into their grasp once, this was all but a blink of an eye. Flickering polycarbonate paneling, corroded alloy panels begin to shift, transforming with every step. The familiar materials of the Old World, corrupted and converted into hardened black muscle. If the darkness did not shroud his vision, his sight would be consumed by the dark tendrils, rugged, throbbing, without end. Bending helix-like structures twisting and twisting below the scavenger's boots, the underground maintenance corridors maze-like without end, resembling the inner entrails of a sinister beast. But the scavenger knew they were foreign, not of any of the worlds in this universe, an incomprehensible incompatible force.

     Carrion birds, come to feast upon the corpse of humanity in its own cradle.

     He felt his perception stretch, a room spanning several thousand kilometers in length, a grated skeleton walkway groaning under his weight. Every step made an acoustic resonance, a loaded challenge for those who sought his demise and those who were in need of assistance to reveal their positions. The thick silence, one that permeates all, confirmed his assumptions. Once before, he was relieved that none came to challenge him. For years afterwards, he spent isolated, relief turned into lamenting, a sorrowful reminder he was fated to be alone. And for the subsequent centuries and millennia that forced themselves upon him, his mind quickly faded to think much of anything at all. To feel anything at all.