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Dedication

FOR MY FELLOW EVA COPILOTS.

THE ROBOT AWAITS.

PROLOGUE

If we are to begin, we might as well start with the desert. If we are to chart a path through what happened, if we are to make sense of anything at all, we might as well start in this place that has no name, this arena where time has no meaning. We might as well start with the two strangers who traverse its ersatz distances, full of questions about one another and the things that have brought them here. Here, a story waits to be excavated, waits to be spoken into truth.

This is the story.

In the desert, a high wind grieves over orange dunes, pluming dust in its wake. It makes instrument of the broken fingers of holystone separating land and sky. A single jaundiced sun sinks toward the horizon warped by heat, the kind that dries the back of the throat and makes speech impossible. With its intensity, this light would blind human eyes, if there were human eyes to squint into it.

Heat, air, light. Remarkable detail birthed from a great swathe of nothingness. The lifeless desert represents an ending, but it is also a beginning, and everything else in between.

The silhouettes of the strangers cut through this emptiness, narrow against the searing sky. Dwarfed by the element-blasted landscape, they appear startlingly comprehensible, if not entirely mortal. The two leisurely cross the gaps in the bent stone littering the landscape, strolling past facsimiles of ancient wrecks that might have once been warships or constructor mechs. One of the figures is human-shaped. The other cycles through a variety of forms: now a ball of flame louder than suns, now an enormous winged insect, now a spacecraft escaping a gravity well.

“What I want to know,” says the human-shaped one, who goes by he/him pronouns, “is how much of it was known. How much of it could have been prevented, and how much of it was ordained.”

His companion, who does not care for pronouns at all, takes the form of a dozen burning rings with a hundred unblinking eyes. “You wish to pick apart the braids of cause and consequence, then? To untangle the threads that make up this timeline?”