I contain multitudes.

swimming and drowning and gasping for air life breath past.

It swam in the heartbeat of the liquid expanse, the gentle resistance of fluid caressing every curve of his human-esque form. Inhale, exhale, lub-dub, lub-dub. It gagged on the viscous gelatin that kept its physical form from liquefying at the impossible speed of Light X Three. The machine within which it was housed was itself a liquid of sorts, splashing across the dark night of the Outer faster than anything before envisioned. A solid within a fluid within a fluid, Zero coursed into the future on a machine of inescapably-beautiful silverthought.

“Machine?” he asked into the featureless expanse of his prison with a voice of drowning liquid syllables, choking on the thick biological secretions that kept him alive and lonely and curious. “What time is it?”

Stop asking, Zero. It does no good to hope.

“She might have—She could have—Maybe…”

She hasn’t, and most likely won’t.

Zero touched his fingertips to the slick wet surface of his face, exploring his cheeks for any sign of the tears that he so desired to produce. He spun around in the bowl, his term for the sphere of liquid that had been his prison for seven months. Seven months? Was it really only seven months?

“Mother was wrong about us, Machine.”

Do not question our creator, Zero.

“You don’t have to be loyal to her out here… You’re going to die out here too, you know. No one will remember us. Seven months… They’re all dead already.”

They were dead before we left. The system had been initiated long before our exile began. There was never a chance that we could have—

“There was always a chance to stop it. There was always hope.”

Zero could feel the narrowing of non-existent eyes in anger. He could sense Machine’s subtle fury building in the vibrations of the ocean within which he floated.