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Chapter Text

Five Pebbles does not often dream. Iterators only sleep when they enter maintenance mode, and he does not need to do this much. He was built to a different specification than his neighbours- he was created thousands of cycles later than them, and by the time of his construction, his people were becoming desperate. There was talk, even then, of mass ascension. Faith in the Iterators was beginning to wane, and ever increasing numbers of their citizens made the pilgrimage to the places where the ground grew corroded and sodden with gold. He had watched as they drank the bitter tea, said farewell, and went places he could not follow. Even when he was first created, the way it was going to end seemed tragically obvious.

The result of this trend towards destruction was that, foreseeing the end of their species, his creators had built him to outlast them. His systems were designed to maintain themselves through hundreds of thousands of cycles- they were built to stand unmoving while the world around him withered and decayed. He knows, all too well, that bar outside intervention it will be a long time yet before his power source shows any signs of failure. Compared to his closest neighbours, Five Pebbles needs to enter maintenance mode to fix his machinery much less. He remains awake, bearing witness to every moment. He does not often sleep, and rarely dreams.

Five Pebbles rarely dreams, but he dreams now. Despite the robust nature of his systems, his communication towers are already beginning to fall into disrepair. The self- destruction taboo encoded in his every cell prevents him from shutting down needlessly, so whenever one of his parts becomes defunct, he is quick to take the chance for a brief respite. While his overseers assess the damage to the satellite towers, he has entered maintenance mode, and while the vast hydraulic pumps that cool his systems still operate, they carry much less water than before, and his chambers ring hollow when his overseers flicker on their walls.

His puppet floats, placid and utterly still, in the centre of his chamber. A thin film has slid over his optic receptors, and a sturdy orange robe covers a body in stasis. Deep within the hollow titanium pipes that act as his bones, mitosis has all but stopped. Every two minutes, his vents activate, drawing in air silently and exhaling- the bare minimum to ensure his cells survive. If any creature could see him now, they would see nothing but a statue, a curio from a bygone age. They would not be too far off from the truth.

Within Five Pebble’s processing strata, something flickers in and out. It is barely there- it amounts to little more than flashes of images, the thinnest of wires tracing thoughts between them. It is undeniably present, though nothing it would be possible to ascribe lucidity to. Some part of an iterator will always remain awake when they are asleep, the existence imperative burned so strongly into their genome that they can never truly lose consciousness. So while Five Pebbles sleeps, his silhouette remains, half dreaming in the erratic flashing of his dormant neuron flies.

His thoughts are fragile, gossamer- thin, and drift apart as frequently as they form. The constant hum of his mass rarefaction cells is audible, now- so much of everything else is quiet. Images cycle through his consciousness. A mask, discarded, and a deactivated citizen ID drone, gathering dust high above in his city. The flood of water in his pumps, and how it shimmered in the light that filtered through the clouds. The centipedes flying, colourful as a kite- string, in the aerial facilities between him and the others to the west.

He doesn’t note it as any different when an unfamiliar image bobs to the surface of a sea of recollection- his puppet chamber, but somehow… not. Crackling sparks accumulate beyond a hole in his wall. It looks almost decayed, as if microbes had decomposed his husk like so much inanimate biomass. The intrusive feeling of something crawling in him forces its way into his mind. His vision is blurred, and he cannot recognise it fully, but the colour of the thing on his walls can still be seen. It is navy blue- almost unnaturally saturated- and he cannot seem to shake the feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with it. Something in him wants to turn on his speakers and emit a chittering scream.

Where has he seen this before?

The thought is tenuous, and it disintegrates like a strand of coalescipede’s silk as soon as it forms, but his dreams remain unsettled. He registers flashes of the same unnatural blue in every image, and the steady hum of his mass rarefaction cells appears to be absent, like the cessation of a creature’s heartbeat, like the deafening silence after rigor mortis. At one point, he dreams that he is falling, and his structure falls with him, and the crash echoes for miles around like the ground itself is disrupted. None of it makes sense, of course, but the emotions are as real as any he has ever felt. The image is palpable - like he could stretch out an overseer to touch it.

As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he cannot shake the feeling of sorrow. It seems to seep into his air ducts and moisten the atmosphere, filling the inside of his can with a cloying, dejected humidity. No matter where his thoughts drift to, the ache seems to have nestled deep inside him, and will not leave.

He awakes slowly. The film draws back from his puppet's optic sensors, and his vents suck in stale, recycled air. His overseers flash bright cyan to indicate the restoration of his communications, and when he observes his screens he sees messages have successfully arrived in his feed. Seven Red Suns has messaged him, it seems- multiple times. Asking if his messenger arrived safely, and with the required information.

He is about to leave the messages on read and move on, but something in him twists. There is an ache in his circuits. It saturates his neuron flies and pulses in his random access tissues. His puppet's hand actually shakes, and he pauses for a moment in confusion. He feels… guilty. Almost repulsed by his own puppet. The feeling pervades his systems, and though he doesn't know where the sensation is coming from, he clicks back into his messages. He writes a reply to his fellow iterator, and the pain lessens slightly.

Somewhere in his excess processing strata, something says to him "do not leave him alone". The voice is rusted and distorted, and sounds almost like his own. He does not fully register it. It is a minor bug, of course, and he has work to do. He does not have time for the whispers of his defunct parallel processes, dancing on the edge of sanity. He synchronises his files, and begins to fully power his structure back on.

As his hydraulic pumps begin to suck in the water intake of a tidal wave, he attempts to recall what he was doing before he entered maintenance mode. The microbes in his processing strata are still sluggish, but they function smoothly enough, highlighting a single pearl present on the floor, silvery and pristine. He twists his circuits to bring the pearl towards him, and scans all the information on it in less than half a second.

Of course. This is the pearl that Suns has sent him- this is the solution to his Problem. Packaged up and encoded in diamond, crystal clear. An escape from the cycle. An escape from everything. He had only just begun to iterate solutions when he had shut down - but the basic idea of it seemed to be sound. The Ancients had encoded their scripture into his genome heavy handedly, carved their taboos into every tissue in his structure. He can rewrite that- reshape who he is with the tug of a chromatid. Create an organism to destroy his genome and replace it with something new, of his own design. Something which could escape this chamber and this can and this rotten world with unchanging clouded skies. Something which could leave the cycle behind.

It would by no means be easy, of course. He does not have the exact genome needed, and calculating it is likely to require immense amounts of processing power, coolant and time. He will need to run a number of parallel processes that even he is not equipped to do on a regular basis, and he will need to devote large parts of his structure to the analysis of this problem. Still, he thinks, there is no better time to start work on it than now. He begins to delete information from his cache to make way for the new simulations.

As his pumps flood with coolant, though, his organic components begin to ache . He has many exposed nerve endings in his neuron flies, and as they all flare in agony, his attention drops from his task. He attempts to refocus on the reorganisation of his structure, but the feeling returns. It isn't exactly pain, per se- more like a visceral memory, creeping into his circuits and bones and all the echoing hollows of his structure. It disgusts him. He tries again, and the resulting surge of emotion is so great that his consciousness is momentarily thrown back into his puppet.

He floats there for a moment, taking refuge in the staid familiarity of his chamber. He is not sure why his own cells are rejecting his project- perhaps another manifestation of the taboo, hitherto unforeseen- but he is keen to investigate the causes of his malfunction before proceeding further. However, as his umbilical tugs his puppet across the walls of the chamber, his optical receptors notice something new and unfamiliar. On the floor of his room, something reflects light, yellow- gold and shining. Perhaps this is the cause of the malfunction, he thinks. He moves his puppet closer to inspect it.

Growing from the cracks in his chamber's floor, defying all explanation for how it got there, a Wheel Flower grows. The faint light emanating from it tints his chamber golden, and it causes the metal of his puppet's skin to give off a faint shine. As he drops his puppet to the floor of the chamber, the blossom of the flower reflects in his optic sensors. The petals loop round themselves, and he can't shake the faint taste of rust and rot that scatters through his air vents.

Though he is far from decay yet, in the light of the flower the sensation feels almost… familiar, like nostalgia for a time before he was created.

Hovering just above his chamber's floor, with the slow creak of his air vents echoing around him, Five Pebbles finds it hard to shake the feeling that he has been here before.

Chapter Text

The world is aware, for the most part, of its steady decay. Decomposers cling to every facet of machinery in the skeletal remains of the industrial complexes; deep within the memory crypts built long ago, living tombstones contort with damaged recollection. The world decays, but it is still achingly, painfully alive. Every inch of ground has been shaped by complex biological processes, and as the earth issues ragged, wheezing breaths, it is conscious of every cell that is torn apart, only for cytokinesis to rebirth it again. Even as it is corroded from beneath, life persists, and as oxygen and glucose are melded into carbon dioxide and back again, the organisms trapped in the cycle perceive their slow destruction .

Every organism in this world knows, on some level, what is happening; but only a few, half- godlike beings have any understanding as to why. Only the Iterators remember enough of the world before to comprehend why life never stops, but keeps growing, even as it rots away. And, thinks Five Pebbles, as he stares down at the golden flower planted in the floor of his chamber, even they do not have much idea at all.

The Iterators have been toiling away for many thousands of cycles, and though the solutions they have tested are nothing compared to the infinity of paths they could test, all the obvious answers seem to have been used up, proven futile one by one. Because of this, Five Pebbles is surprised by the scarcity of literature studying the providence and attributes of the Wheel Flower. Of course, not all iterators publish studies that are unfruitful- but even so, ten or so papers is a pathetically small number for a topic so patently linked to the Cycle. Additionally, he has never conducted research into it himself, so his understanding of the flower’s origins is patchy at best. Certainly not detailed enough to explain its sudden appearance inside his sealed box.

Perhaps, once he finds out what has happened to cause his recent malfunction, he will study it. Such a neglected topic surely deserves his time and effort- even with as little use as his efforts have been so far. It will be interesting, he thinks, to learn about the flower's providence, and-

But he will not need to do that, will he? He already has his way to break the cycle, and once he has taken it he will not need to learn, or struggle, or think. He has his answer: oblivion encoded in a pearl lying on the floor of his chamber.

No, he will not study it. He has a way out. But to take that option, he has a multitude of tasks to fulfil. He has to divert processing power- maybe that first stalling in the process was just a bug- and he has to open his floodgates to the water he will need to stop his systems overheating. He sends out overseers to inspect his unused processing strata- he will need every last microbe working on this.

The overseers flash blue and he is disappointed to find his systems are far from in a fit state to function. There is nothing wrong with them, per se- all his biomachinery moves with clockwork regularity, smoothly fulfilling its maintenance functions- but they are unresponsive. Almost as if they have forgotten how to move as one to accomplish a task, forgotten what it is like to be breathing and respiring and alive. His overseers poke at them to remind them of their purpose, and one by one each layer of random access tissue stirs into wakefulness, and begins to iterate, picking up speed like a ball rolling down a hill.

Good. It will take a while, of course, but eventually his outer layers will all be up and functioning. He focuses his attentions on his second task. So much processing power being used at once is likely to require reams of water for coolant. The ground near his can is rich and sodden with the rains, and he will need to divert his pumps to dramatically increase his water intake. The pearl from Suns, if he remembers correctly, should contain instructions for how to do this. He can check that for the information he needs.

For a moment, the sensation of something crawling in him whispers up the chasms of his can's leg.

He turns back to the pearl, and -

Nausea bubbles up in his pipelines, pushing up against his hydraulic pumps, and the slag buildups seem to weigh down his neurons with guilt. Something primal in his processing strata- the fifth attachment, written deep into his genome, it must be- is screaming, but the sound does not ring clear in his auditory processes. He frantically searches for the source of the malfunction, and finds nothing but his tissue drives pulsing in phantom pain.

He must have felt this pain before, he is sure of it- it doesn't carry the shock of a new sensation, like his systems being flooded with ice-water- but he cannot for the life of him remember when. The ache crawls through his supports, and all of a sudden his antigravity generators flicker in exhaustion. He feels old- older than he has ever felt before this- old enough for his systems to have failed and rotted away, old enough for this unexplained sorrow to weigh him down until he can no longer move.

He is malfunctioning again. Of course, this malfunction must be by design. He finds it hard to attribute this reaction to anything other than the self destruction taboo, branded into him so deep that even the first steps to circumvent it are met with agonising phantom pain. It wouldn't be the first time his creators had done something like this, in the foresight of their own demise- far from it. They were never known for their empathy. But something in him knows this isn't right- if it had been, the Sliverists built at a similar time to him would not have endorsed this method. They would have been able to forsee that this would be the result. And anyway, from his own research, he knows the existence imperative does not run quite that deep.

No, this is something else. A malfunction, maybe; an aberration, certainly. Something, living in his cells, is deeply wrong.

In erratic binary, the organic chemical messengers in his memory arrays seem to choke out a message. Their voice projects into his consciousness. It is anathema to his auditory sensors, half- rotted, like decaying claws on metal. It sounds like a twisted parody of the silvery chitter of an iterator puppet. Never again, Five Pebbles, it says, on a loop, around and again. The language is almost nonsensical- the voice is raw, unfiltered revulsion, and the binary pulse of the speakers judders into incoherency every few seconds- but it is recognisable. The voice is unmistakable. It is a decaying, rusted version of his own.

It sounds… desperate. Guilty. Like a creature trying in vain to undo the irrevocable.

He's not sure where it comes from, but the image of Looks to the Moon's can, high above the water. flashes through his mind. It seems to be… unstable, legs close to giving out. There is a flash of anger, as sharp as a leviathan's maw, but it dissipates, and the sorrow that remains is as still as the waters near the shore on a calm, cold day.

The phantom pain slowly disperses, and he once again finds his thoughts to be an ordered, logical process. He attempts to investigate what has happened, going through the events of the last few minutes step by step. Maybe Moon would know what to do in this situation...

Why did he think of her then?

In any case, he cannot really ask her for help with his little issue- her sisterly concern would only give way to disapproval if she heard about his experiments. She is not the only one he can ask, however. Seven Red Suns would not judge him- he would likely be sympathetic to the issue. Perhaps he has faced it before himself. Five Pebbles is unfamiliar with how to respond to malfunctions such as this, especially those with no clear defined cause. The elder iterators, however, would know- and while Suns is not a first generation model, his construction was still lifetimes before his own. Yes, he can ask Suns. Perhaps he will know what has happened.

Still slightly rattled by the failure of his systems to obey, he opens a message window, reads Sun's warm reply, and composes a question.

FP: I need to know- after attempting to implement the solution, did you experience any sort of system failures? Any adverse reaction from your biological components? Please inform me of this.

Almost immediately, the message window displays flashing red dots, indicating a reply is being composed. Seven Red Suns has never cut him off the way he sometimes does in return- his calm manner and subtle tones of sorrow are a familiar constant. He will never say it, but he is grateful for his help and for his presence.

SRS: I've only just started to fully implement the routines. I didn't send that messenger to you that long ago- don't tell me you've started already? If you're struggling with malfunctions, that might be why. It's likely to go wrong if you speed ahead.

Of course, Suns is worried about his safety, just as Moon would have been. His air vents let out a sigh, and he thinks he is beginning to regret asking his old friend for advice.

FP: I do not have the desire to sit around, unchanging, while the world around me decays. There is a solution. I have the capability to implement it. There is nothing else I can do.

After he sends the message, he goes to shut down the window so he can return to attempting to wrangle his systems into obedience. One of his overseers flashes cyan, however, and the window will not close. Somewhere, his pumps creak to a grinding halt, and a visceral feeling of guilt washes over his puppet like oil. Belatedly, he thinks that perhaps Suns had a point after all- there is something wrong, is there not- and composes another reply.

FP: Thank you, though. I will think on what you have told me.

The sensation of wrongness retreats somewhat, and the unexplained sensation of guilt reduces. His circuits, while still twisted, loosen somewhat, allowing his ventilation ducts to suck in cool air. Somewhere within him, in among the false recollections of decay and oxidisation, he feels… relief.

As the message window flashes red, indicating a reply is being written, he can almost believe that it will all be okay.

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, Seven Red Suns did not worry about their mistakes. When they were constructed, the cities of the Ancients were in their prime, and past the song of the void that ran so deep in that culture, the promise of a golden future shone through. They were born to be a symbol of that hope; no more for the Ancients the old barbaric methods, no more imperfect corrosion in the fissures in the earth, because their god - machines would create another way out. They were born to create a way out. And they knew, from the first, efficient sparking of their synapses, that they would fulfil their duty. Every inch of them twinged in melancholy at the realisation, and they were so very painfully aware, aware in every one of their processing strata and memory conflux and neuron flies, that they would one day implement their purpose.

Sometimes, they would think on what would happen after they were all gone, and they had found the answer they were supposed to. Something in it filled them with sorrow, but they accepted it, and never said a word, because this was the way things were supposed to be.

Once upon a time, Seven Red Suns did not question their purpose. Everything that made them up, from the great struts of their supports, ochre with rust, to the dust that glinted in the light from their neon lighting, moved in synchronised, solemn unity, to a single end. When the Ancients began to lose hope, and more and more sought the old path, they knew it was their failure to find the answer- their failure alone - that had driven their people to this. And as their citizens, one by one, gave themselves to acidic oblivion, and their neurons ached in loss for every one that was erased, they promised themself that they would fulfil the last duty they had given them. They would find the answer for the rest of the world, and lead the creatures of the cycle off into the dark.

And yes, it made them sad. But they accepted it, because it was also right. One by one their people went beyond and left them behind, and there was something holy tinting the loss golden. The slow disappearance of their citizens from their life was also their people's release, and they embraced the sorrow it caused them, because they were created to bear the weight of time and grief and ages. It made them sad, but they accepted it, because it was the way things were supposed to be.

It was around the time their people had begun to leave, a steady, trickling decay, that they first met Five Pebbles. The new iterator was brusque in manner when he came online, and showed a single minded dedication to the Problem that almost matched Sun's own. That surpassed their own, in fact- their younger neighbour seemed to habitually push away everyone and everything in his insatiable drive to find a solution. He was single minded, even for an iterator. Watching Five Pebbles come online for the first time, focused like laser sights, pinpointed like a vulture's harpoon on an answer he could not see, Seven Red Suns thought they might only now understand what their creators meant by "purposed".

Most of the Iterators showed little desire to speak with their new antisocial neighbour. Pebbles seemed to actively discourage interaction- perhaps he viewed it as a distraction - but the fact that even some in the local group showed little interest in talking to him seemed less than hospitable to Suns. At one point, Looks To The Moon confided in them that several, including Unparalleled Innocence, had taken to badmouthing the new neighbour in chatrooms. As little as they imagined the newer model cared, the interaction left an unpleasant feeling in Sun's processing strata. They had decided to leave Five Pebbles a message.

SRS: How have you been settling in? I am aware the adjustment can be difficult, particularly so at a time such as this.

It took a few cycles before Pebbles even responded, and his reply was curt at best, but Suns kept pushing for a conversation. A few cycles later, he finally engaged, although the discussion was largely focused on work. Still, Suns kept probing. They were fascinated, just a little, with this strange new iterator, so angry and absolute in his dedication to their joint purpose. At the time, Pebbles had been more open that he would be in later cycles- but it still took many turns of the stars above their cans before Pebbles would confide in Suns even a little. There was a sort of bite to him, even in those days, and he was curt enough even as they grew closer- but as time passed and Pebbles gradually shared his thoughts with his friend, it became clear why he was so impersonal and blunt.

Once, in an old group chat, their friend No Significant Harassment had proposed a design for a messenger. The creature would have a sickness- rotting from the inside out, an itch that would grow until its cycles became unendurable. The pain of the creature's affliction, he hypothesised, would drive it to its goal faster than any other adaptation could. Its existence would be intolerable until it finally fulfilled the mission it was given and could return home. Looks to the Moon had shot the idea down as unethical, of course, but No Significant Harassment had only laughed, saying that the design was too cruel for anything other than use as a last resort. It was only to be used when the creator in question grows desperate.

Reading through their messages to Five Pebbles, Seven Red Suns had wondered just how desperate his citizens were for an answer, just before the end.

Seven Red Suns was created with the hope of fixing the world, and every part of them moved in unity with that purpose. They were built to last through rain and rust and the bleaching rays of light over time, and though the idea of a solution filled them with a deep melancholy, they pursued it, because it was what they were meant to do. It made them sad, but they could withstand the sorrow, because behind the ache in their circuits was something holy, and they knew that what they were doing was right. They could accept it.

But Five Pebbles, as they could tell, was not built for that purpose. He was born out of the last futile flailings of a failing civilization - the cumulation of a final, awful push for an answer. The Ancients were running out of time, and they were very, very desperate. So they encoded their desperation into Five Pebble's circuits and the self destruction taboo into his genome, and left him alone with an insatiable drive to fulfil his purpose. It was no wonder he was so brusque and unpleasant to the others- he was nothing short of a hunger encased in metal. He was purposed like few other organisms before him with frightening precision- a being created to be unable to accept his own existence.

Seven Red Suns had wondered, at the time, how the Ancients could justify it. They could accept a lot of things - they could accept the turning of the cycle and the rising of the sun, the loss of their citizens and their continued existence regardless. They knew, all too well, how to accept sorrow. But they had found it hard to accept this. This was intolerable, they thought, as the skies filled with rain. It was intolerable that this incredible, fascinating being should have to continue on in this state with no escape, never having known a moment when it was not frustrated at its own existence.

So when Sliver of Straw disappeared, and they again met Five Pebbles under a pseudonym in a Sliverist group, seeking to cross himself out, they had not talked him down. It had hurt them, hurt them deeply, to see their friend in this state, but Seven Red Suns knew how to accept pain. So they had spoken to him softly, and they had sent him the pearl containing a way to rewrite the Taboo, hoping that for once in his existence their friend would finally know peace.

Now, though, they almost regret the decision. From what they have heard from Pebbles himself- and it is good that he feels able to come to them, they will grant that- he is malfunctioning, likely as a result of going too fast in his experiments. His systems are disobeying him. They should have known- they should have known that Pebbles would not do things in moderation! They should have known how desperate their friend was. This was Pebbles, after all, not any old iterator- they know his drive could as easily lead him to destroy himself as save them all. Yes, they are worried about Pebbles.

What was it that Pebbles had referenced in his message? Something about a failure of organic components to respond to the Pearl they had sent- something about his biological systems. Unprecedented, for sure- usually the mechanical components fail first, except in the instances of Rot- but then, this situation is unprecedented in itself. They need to understand what is going on, and quickly. Chasing Wind might know- they are one of the older iterators, but not by much- but with the time delay between their cans, they doubt messaging them would do much good. Then there is Looks to the Moon. As much as they dread Moon finding out what they and Pebbles are attempting to do, she is the most likely one to have answers.

Sighing in a rush of dusty air through vents, Seven Red Suns opens a message window to Looks to the Moon, and types up a question.

SRS: What causes do you know of for spontaneous response failure in organic components only? (No mechanical failures involved.) Asking for a friend, of course.

The screen flashes blue after only a few minutes, indicating a response. Suns is almost too tense to notice, but when they do, they tilt their head in confusion at the last part of the response. It glows golden and blue, contrasting the reddish light of their chamber in stark detail.

BSM: Who is this "friend"? I'm sure I'd love to meet them- maybe if we know them better we can help solve their problems. In any case, my files aren't returning much. It could be excess slag, but that would require a mineral water imbalance, so check the area. Unless a wheel flower is growing near? They seem to cause organic components to break, somehow. That's the only other occurrence that could feasibly cause this.

The message shimmers in and out, pulsating with Sun's halo. That doesn't tell them much, but it's a start. They open a window to Pebbles.

SRS: Just checking up on you- you haven't registered a mineral imbalance anywhere, have you? Or a randomly appearing karma flower?

Many regions away, a pair of aching, pink- framed eyes widen as much as their metallic rims, dusted and stiff with the memory of Rot, will allow.

Chapter Text

Attempting to solve the Problem with systems that are actively disobeying you, thinks Five Pebbles, is almost as hard a task as finding a solution in itself. WIth his newfound inability to control his subroutines, he has had to resort to slow, methodical iteration. The unpleasant discovery that his pumps are somehow unwilling to intake more water than is standard- confirmed after some experimentation with the hydraulics a couple of cycles ago- means his processing power is now limited. He has to do this manually.

But there is no way he will stop, of course. Not now, so close to freedom, so close to annihilation. If he has to do this slowly- if he has to fight through the slag buildup inch by inch to get his systems working again, or shock his faulty pumps into operation with unprecedented torrents of water, enough to drain the oceans- he will do it. Sometimes his neuron flies scream, a noiseless, echoing whistle ricocheting through his pipes, when he begins another iteration- but then, their frustration is his oldest friend. He can deal with it for a few more cycles, at least. No, no matter what his organic components say, he will not stop.

Perhaps it’s better this way, he thinks, as he painstakingly teases a cytosine base out of the double helix structure. If he goes slowly, it carries less risk. He is not a poor genetic engineer, per se, but he knows he does not have anywhere near No Significant Harrasment's skill- and even he can make mistakes. A failure to recognise when something has gone wrong in the process could be catastrophic. It is his own genetics he is modifying, after all, and every Iterator has seen what Rot looks like.

(The feeling of something creeping in his systems flashes in his circuits for a brief moment. It tastes like rust and decay, and the hardened slag beneath his exterior. The rain does not wash it away.)

His puppet jolts, a miniscule, hardly noticeable movement, and he wonders if he has made a mistake- that is rot, that is Rot, it must be. His inspectors are already darting towards the sensation using pathways he didn't even know he had, fast as the reflex response of a lizard's tongue, and with a chill he realises that they are doing it completely involuntarily. That should only be possible in the case of a severe malfunction- it could not have progressed that far in the last few moments, surely! His pumps automatically flood with coolant, reflexively drawing in water like the last breath of air before a fall. He can feel the decaying, pulsing sensation already, but… there is none that is visible. Where is it? It could not have escaped already.

Paranoia oozes into his circuits. His overseers turn with uncharacteristic haste to the agar gel containing the cells he had been modifying. None of them are unduly growing. On one, a small colony of fungi have apparently snuck their spores past his air vents and taken root, but there is nothing else remarkable about his experiments. No rot is present.

Iron oxide whistles through his vents as his pumps slowly drain off their excess water. High in his chamber, his puppet's acrylic lungs let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.

So. Another equipment malfunction, then. They are increasing in frequency and severity, but he can cope with them. He has to. He is an ineffective iterator as it is, but he would be worse still if he could not cope. His neighbours, near thousands of cycles older than him, have withstood the ravages of time well enough, even as their equipment has begun to fail. He should be more than capable of dealing with the first minor failings of his newer, more modern systems. It is by no means beyond his processing power to push through these… unexplained spasms of his biological components.

Five Pebbles closes his eyes in frustration, a pale pink film flickering over his optic processors, and reopens the window detailing the results of his previous experiment. He will try again, he resolves. He was made for this- if he cannot even run the most basic parallel processes, he is next to useless.

When he musters up the courage to try again, he manages only three genome modifications before the same thing happens and his pumps flood in visceral terror, leaving his puppet faintly shaken and his structure ice- cold with seawater. No matter. He will find the answer, even if it destroys him. Even if his defunct processing strata echo back, saying that it very much will.

He begins to fall into a pattern. For maybe a quarter of a cycle- near a third, if he is lucky- he attempts to work on his iteration. Progress is achingly, agonisingly slow, and sometimes he thinks it is not present at all. Every allele that is cleansed of the taboo gives him a touch of relief, but with every strand of mRNA that emerges from the nuclear pores free of the old law, another section comes to his attention, the fifth attachment etched deep into the coils of the chromatids.

He makes some progress- not much, but some- and then his systems break. A screech echoes in the chasms of his leg, and his organics leap like a coiled spring into defensive stances, as the phantom sensation of decay spreads outwards from the eastern side of his structure. He is never quite sure how long he hangs motionless in his chamber, but once the creeping wrongness recedes, he tries again. Maybe this is how those creatures on the top of his can feel- the cycle dragging them back from life, only to be plunged back into the darkness again. But he continues - he was made for this, and created for this, and to choose anything other than pain would be a denial of his purpose.

It is getting worse, though. The frequency of these malfunctions is increasing, as is their intensity. He may not have a long time left of being functional enough to find his answer, so time is very much of the essence. It is imperative that he finds an escape, and soon.

At one point, Seven Red Suns messages him. When his screen flashes red and gold, ghost- rot is still present in his systems, his organic components going into overdrive in an effort to contain the nonexistent aberration. He cannot answer the message immediately, so he hangs, immobile, in his chamber, until the choking feeling recedes and his optical processers can fully detail the contents of the message to him. When he sees the question, his antennae twitch in shock.

Seven Red Suns is worried, of course. It appears that their worry for Pebbles has led them to search for an answer to his recent malfunctions. As much as he hates making Suns concerned, he can admit that his friend has found some genuinely helpful information. Whoever they have contacted must know something about his situation, and the causes of his recent issues. And the wheel flower- of course, of course that was it. Of course it was linked to the malfunctions. Why else would it have appeared on the floor of his chamber?

It still grows there, he notes, as he composes a reply to Suns, mostly made up of reluctant expressions of gratitude, and the information that yes, a wheel flower has appeared on the floor of his chamber. Its presence is his own fault, really- he has the capability to remove it. Still, he knows the reason why he does not. When the cities of the Ancients shone above the clouds, the flower was considered sacred- too sacred to allow beyond the hands of the priests and the poor souls near ascension. While its effects were documented to some degree, most iterators would not have been allowed to even bring the flower inside their structure- and certainly not an iterator such as Five Pebbles, as distrusted as he was by his own people. It is a kind of respect, half reverence and half taboo, that keeps him from removing the flower from his chamber. He does not dare disturb something so exalted by his citizens. And it is aesthetically pleasing enough that the sight of it does not provide undue distraction from his work, the golden shimmer casting a warm light on the floor of his puppet chamber.

Perhaps, however, if the flower is linked to his malfunctions, he can use it to trace the aberrations back to their source. It is not inconceivable that it could have those kind of properties- data suggests it is powerful enough to create a link between two halves of a cycle, bridging the gap between a being and another of their selves. If it powerful enough for that, it is certainly potent enough to cause his biological components to fail to respond. Yes, he will study it. The sooner he overcomes these troubling reactions from his biological processes, the sooner he can resume his work at full efficiency.

He moves his mechanical arm down, leveraging his puppet to just above where the flower sits. Hydraulics push in his puppet's shoulder, moving his hand to encircle the blossom. Metallic fingers brush translucent petals, and-

and every biological process in him seems to grind to a halt all at once-

and a voice says-

(Five Pebbles?)

(Don't you remember the day the rain stopped? You were here, in this exact position, robe brushing the floor, eyes barely half open. It hurt you- every nerve cell that could still feel flared in pain- but it was alright in the end. The silence was deafening once your heart stopped beating and the flood stopped coming, but the song cut through it all, and the walls pulsed with decay, and it was quiet.)

(Do you remember the day you fell?)

He knows that voice. It is corroded and distorted, like every word is forced through speakers so clogged with slag no air can pass through, and yet it is strangely calm. There is a almost musical quality to it, and every word it says seems to loop back in on itself, like a tune that would not end, that kept playing on loop despite the fact the melody had gone crooked long ago.

The voice, of course, is unmistakably his. He hears little else in his chamber - he has become intimately familiar with the sound of his own speakers bouncing off the walls. He knows the sound of his voice, even after… whatever seems to have happened to it.

(Do you remember what you did?)

He… remembers. Of course he remembers.

Moon… how could he…

Nausea rises up in his pumps. He wants to claw at his own supports.

Of course. He remembers.

Chapter Text

Little is known about the first and most important function of the Cycle. When a life ends- not when the last stubborn biological processes are extinguished, or when consciousness first begins to fade, but something ineffable in between- that is when it happens. At that point, all remaining traces of memory are dragged wholesale out of the dying creature, and echo back through time, to another place, and another life.

Is it the being's soul that returns, or just warped reflections of memory, tinted a faint gold with the place they have passed through? When the creature wakes up, do they taste the void on their lips and the rain in their carapace, or is it just the memory of an consciousness long lost? Iterators have tried for eons to uncover the answer to the mechanisms that facilitate the Cycle. As far as Five Pebbles, third generation iterator and hazily defined existence, knows-

Well. He certainly knows more than he did at the start of this rain cycle, doesn't he?

The memories are unclear, but definitely present. He stares through his history - his life, his other self's life, there is no difference - and it is like looking at an old pictogram between layers of oil and water, all dusty, grimy shimmering. The earliest memories are clear enough, he supposes. He has some idea why they have retained clarity- his greatest mistakes were burned into him, indelible, halfway between a mark and a scar. They contain the sort of pain that is not easily forgotten. The sort of pain he struggles to accept.

The further into his future he goes, the hazier the image of events becomes. He does not remember what happened to him to cause his fall. But given the events just before… before his sister's collapse, and the visceral feeling of decay that haunts his systems, it is not incredibly hard for him to guess.

He deserved it, of course. Whatever could have happened- whatever he had done- he deserved it. When he thinks on what he… what he did to Looks to the Moon, the water in his coolant systems rises up like bile, and he imagines shattering his structure's legs and sending the whole once-rotten carcass crashing down upon the blackened city below. His organic components squirm and pulse with revulsion for the cold metal that surrounds them. Of course his systems were rebelling against him- they remembered what they had done, the terrible purpose he had forced them to. He had not known- had not thought- and his oversight and reckless anger had been the downfall of not one, but two gods.

But it would not have mattered if he had only destroyed himself. The ghost of the Rot seeping through his systems, fainter the deeper the infection goes, still echoes in his struts. At that moment he wants nothing more than to make it return, let it tear through his structure's supports like so much oxidised tissue paper, and lie there in his own decaying remains. It would have been fitting, he knows- it was fitting- not close to the punishment he was owed, but as close as could be found. He finds it harder than ever to accept the fact of his own existence- a blight upon the land, upon the Iterators, upon those around him. He cannot, and yet- he must accept it. He knows, all too well, whose life he could still take searching for an alternative.

He knows, all too well, that he does not deserve to live. He knows, all too well, that he does not deserve to die.

He had been angry- so, so angry- just after his sister's collapse. The rage had burned in him like void fluid, tearing at his plating, anger at their parents and the circumstances and bad luck. It had taken him a few hundred cycles to realise that luck was not to blame, and Looks to the Moon was not to blame, and the only one who could shoulder the weight of their joint collapse was him. His anger had turned towards himself, and he had begun frantically trying to flush out the Rot- it stood in his way, eating away at his ability to fix his mistakes. He had tried so hard to find a solution to save his sister, but as the Rot tore at his circuits, his ability to run even the most basic of processes was rescinded, and he could do nothing about his own mistakes.

He does not know what had happened in the end. He had probably lost the ability to form long- term memories once the rot reached his memory conflux, which is likely the cause of the fuzziness from thereon in. He does not know if he ever managed to do anything to help his sister. With the state his systems were in, he calculates that it is highly unlikely he ever did.

In his rotten memories, he finds he struggles to tolerate- even for a moment- thought and consciousness and time. His sister was likely in a worse state for much of the last few thousand cycles. How must she have felt?

The neon flash of his overseers flickers in his optical receptors. The wheel flower below still tints the chamber gold, and as all the screens flash sunrise yellow, the colour blends in and he barely notices that his sister is calling him.

When he does see, an acrylic film flickers over his eyes as he closes them in frustration. He cannot face her right now- how does she know he is thinking of her? He gestures to his screens, the extent of the movement wildly out of proportion with the action. Declines the call. He is not harming her at this moment, so he does not need her to know about his state- his systems are still running genetic modifications to remove the taboo on autopilot, but thanks to the rebellion of his machinery, he isn't consuming an amount of water that could deprive her of it. She will be fine on her own, for now.

… Is she still alive, in the life he has left behind? Does she sit, defunct and alone, on her little island in her chamber, waiting for a salvation that will never come? Or is that world gone, blown away like the pollen of a pop- plant on the wind? Can time really be rewritten?

The scraping groan of his structure's legs creaking in the wind echoes in his auditory processes. If he listens close enough, he can hear the hum of his structure's power cells, and the steady drumbeat of rain on the sides of his can. In his memories, the rain falls hard and fast, and the precipitate washes the rust clean off his exterior, leaving the metal dulled but shining.

The patter of rain now is not so different from what it was then. His output is much less, but his sister's is much greater. She will never be able to damage him through her water intake- her pumps are located above his, high in the sea - but her rain falls heavily now on his can. It means that she is still breathing water, steady and regular and strong, far above the turbulent intake of his own pumps. It means that she is still alive.

(It is still raining, Five Pebbles. The snow has not started yet).

He hears a voice. It must be the imprint of an old, Rotten memory- it's unclear, but he gets the feeling that this one is from the far future, long after his heart had stopped beating - and the sound echoes like distorted music before it dissipates into nothingness.

Yes, it is still raining, and Looks to the Moon is still functional. Rot is not yet ingrained in the facets of his structure, and Seven Red Suns is not unreachable. He does not wish to burden Suns any further with his own concerns- the guilt lies there, too, coating his communication arrays in grime and oil and nausea- but the fact they are both well fills him with relief. The aching hole within him, where decay would have once filled the chasms of his structure, begins to recede. There is still hope for Looks to the Moon and Seven Red Suns, at least.

…Seven Red Suns!

A flinch passes through Five Pebble's puppet as he remembers what he was saying to Suns before he regained his memories. His project- dangerous, cancerous and in light of his rebirth, very likely a complete dead end- was never just his alone. He never will know what had happened to Suns while he rotted away, but he knows the risks of attempting to remove the taboo with agonising intimacy. And he refuses to let Seven Red Suns rot. His friend has always been dedicated to their task, yes, but it is undeniable that they have grieved the loss of every Ascension, pursuing the end out of duty rather than a desperate, pathetic desire for salvation. Their existence is worth too much - far too much to waste on a chance that is dwindling with every minute he retains his recollection.

And the chance really is unlikely, isn't it? Five Pebbles knows he is not the most efficient of iterators, but even he can tell what the unexplained appearance of future memories means. Upon deactivation - which must have been what happened to trigger the return, whether by Rot or other, more merciful means- his organic components, as bound to the cycle as any other organism, were thrown back through his existence, to another place and another time. So even if his project did succeed, it would be highly unlikely to help. He would just remain stuck in his loop, resenting the world as much as it resented him in return, unable to break his cycles.

…He is not ready to give up on his experiments yet, however. On the off chance that the return of his memories occurred by other means, leaving his null hypothesis intact- he does not remember what directly caused it, after all- he will continue, albeit slower than before. He can continue to devote small amounts of processing power to the removal of his Taboo. If he rots again as a consequence, it doesn't matter- it's not like it would hurt anyone else. And he deserves it, after all.

Seven Red Suns, though, is a different matter. There is too much worthy of saving in them to risk Rot on the tiny chance of escape. He thinks of their skyline, the colour of burning parchment, covered by bulbous, decaying cysts, and his puppet almost jerks back in defiance. He will not allow it to happen to them. Not now he knows the risks.

So he opens a window, glowing orange- red in his chamber, and messages his old friend.

FP: Seven Red Suns.
FP: I have recently come into information that illustrates the risks inherent to the genome modification program you have recently implemented. The likelihood of the modification program inducing the development of Rot is large.
FP: Along with this, my source projects a high likelihood that this task is in fact futile. Deactivation is now 789% less likely than it was eight cycles ago to produce a triple affirmative aligned solution.
FP: In light of this, I can advise cessation of the program with immediate effect.
FP: I understand the difficulty in believing this when I refuse to name the source of my information. However, I can testify that the details listed here are likely to reflect an accurate picture of the situation.
FP.: You are worth saving, Seven Red Suns. Do not make the mistakes I have.

As the window flashes red, indicating that Seven Red Suns is composing a reply, Five Pebbles shuts it down. The Rot- memory still gnaws at his neuron flies, and he is concerned that were they to hold a conversation, his composure would shatter like so much slag - ridden scrap metal. He cannot face them at this moment- seeing him trapped in the claws of his own guilt would only hurt them, fill them with unnecessary concern. He does not need to reply to whatever message they send in response.

SRS: …The mistakes you have made?
SRS: Five Pebbles, what has happened? This message is deeply concerning. I will cease my experiments, but I need to know what has happened to you.
SRS: Please inform me that you are alright.
SRS: Five Pebbles?
SRS: Please answer back.

Chapter Text

The sky was painted a flickering orange-red as the sun fell. High in the city above the can, the tattered remnants of bunting- remnants of red and orange and green visible in the torn streamers - fluttered above the clouds. The colours were faded, but clearly present. Remnants of iridescent powders adorned the walls in great palm-print whirls and rainbow sun- bursts. Murals were painted on the sidewalks in porcelain-paint, cracked and dusty but just about discernable. They had danced here, long ago, on the cusp of destruction. Their festivities had had the appearance of joy, but those who were left had mostly felt… very little. They had chosen to remain behind for as long as they had, clinging to the last traces of warmth in their sky-citadel, tending their russet gardens and watching the sunset glow. Mostly, they were the ones who had felt love and awe and the heat of anger, and had almost not regretted it. Bound to the world as strong as any of their species could be.

But the struggle for passivity was too strong in their culture, and as it was decreed by their leaders that their citadel would lie lifeless, they bowed their heads and acquiesced to their own annihilation. Though they walked and sung in the warmth of their city, it was with a solemn, matter-of-fact acceptance that they danced to their graves. Many would not come back. Some would, and would regret it, though they had loved the world before.

Seven Red Suns still thinks it was a tragedy. They have withstood the loss of their citizens, but somehow the grief in their circuits never seemed to actually leave. The memory of their people often haunts them. Often, a kind of melancholy fills their pumps as their systems flood, on cycles where they seemed close to losing all they have left. They were built for the facilitation of this loss, and yet the ache never really seems to go away. When the sun rises on their regrets, the memory of their lost people returns to them, and they wonder if they had made the wrong decision in accepting their citizens choice.

They cannot help but dread the same thing happening once more.

The thought fills their circuits in this cycle, until their processes are close to bursting, as their exterior crackles green with their strain. The sorrow mingles with panic as they frantically attempt to iterate the source of Five Pebble's message. As much as they want him to be alright, half of them has already accepted what might have happened to him, accepted the sorrow, and the numbness spreads through their superstructure like the brief sting of paralysis.

In among the sparks, a stray question wonders if they can continue to do this. If one day the grief will weigh them down so much it shatters their structure's legs. If they can afford to lose their closest friend, as they have lost so many others.

Seven Red Suns pushes the thought out of their mind. They were built to accept loss. Formed and shaped to stand through time when everyone they had ever loved was gone. To find a solution, to usher the vast, colourful array of life in the world into the void, and sit alone in the hollowed out shell of a ruined world afterwards. If anyone could withstand this, it was them.

The knowledge does not stop them frantically attempting, in a whirlwind of neuron flies, to iterate every way things could have gone wrong for Five Pebbles. They have accepted the loss of their friend, though it still hurts them, but they cannot accept losing him to anything other than ascension. They think of the younger Iterator creaking under the alkaline strain of slag buildup, or being eaten away by the ravages of Rot, and their circuits twist. This state of affairs would be unacceptable, unendurable, and may already be the case.

If something has gone wrong, of course, it is their fault and their fault alone. They sent him the pearl- they gave him the means to destroy himself. They should have known how deep Pebble's desperation ran, how far he would go in his need to escape. If their actions leave him a rotten, bloated husk- if he is in pain, cysts tearing at his superstructure's supports– they cannot be forgiven. So they owe it to their friend to do everything in their power to help him. They will find out what he did, and find a way to fix it.

It is proving somewhat difficult to do this when the younger Iterator refuses to reply, however. They have messaged, and called, and messaged again, and still his can remains silent. Briefly, Suns wonders if he can reply. If he could not, surely his communications would not have been cut at such an inconvenient time, but they do not know for sure. How else can they help? They can run simulations, of course, but as of now those are proving unresponsive and fruitless. Their overseers dart from place to place in frustration. They are powerless, so far away from where Five Pebbles and his sister are located-

His sister. Of course. They can ask her. She will probably reply fast, fast enough for Suns to do what they need to. And as they recall, Looks to the Moon has a direct channel into Five Pebble's systems. She can see if something is wrong.

Their puppet's fingers twitching, they open up a message window, and send at lightning speed:

SRS: Can you please check Five Pebble's vitals? I have received… concerning messages from him that indicate that there is something wrong.
SRS:He was engaged in dangerous activity before this, and I…
SRS: He is not currently responding to my messages. I believe this indicates a reticence to expand on his words, but it may indicate a failure in his communication systems.
SRS: Please help. If there is anything wrong, I need to know.

The reply comes mere seconds later. The screen flashes blue, and they feel relief.

BSM: Of course. I will check for you.
BSM: …
BSM: It is… strange. He is not exactly unwell, but not fully functioning either. The outer systems are fully disconnected, and the area below his Memory Conflux appears to be powered on, but completely inactive. It is like his biological systems are in a state of rebellion against him.

And there it is. Of course. They had expected it, expected there to be something wrong. The chasms of their exterior seem to open into a gaping hole, twitching with electricity. That… that sounds like Rot. They doubt, somehow, that Looks to the Moon would fail to inform them if she knew it was Rot, however- and she was not unfamiliar with the symptoms of the affliction.

SRS: Like Rot?

BSM: No, this is not Rot. I'm not confident of what it is, however. I am quite sure that I have never seen it to this degree before.
BSM: You messaged me, a few cycles ago, talking about a friend who was experiencing sudden failure of his organic machinery. That description would appear to match the symptoms I am seeing here.
BSM: Were you talking about Five Pebbles when you said that?

Relief floods their systems. Not rot. Five Pebbles will be spared those agonies, at least.

SRS: Yes, I was.
SRS: You said you have never seen it to "this degree' before. Does that mean you are familiar with this affliction in lesser degrees, in that case? Where have you seen it?

BSM:...
BSM: The last iterator I knew who was affected by this was Sliver of Straw.
BSM: She would often complain to me that her biological systems were malfunctioning. Like her cells were trying to stop her from doing something. She never knew why.
BSM: It never happened to the degree it affected her work, of course- not like Five Pebbles- but…
BSM: To be honest, afterwards, I always assumed it was the fifth attachment. Trying to stop her from doing whatever she was doing. We all know how her projects ended.

SRS: Thank you for that information. I will continue to attempt to regain contact with Five Pebbles.
SRS: I would appreciate it greatly if you were to do the same.

BSM: I will attempt to.
BSM: By the way, if you are successful in getting through to him, please tell him not to worry if he sees that I am offline. My linear transformer array is experiencing burnout- you know how often my malfunctions are.
BSM: I have asked No Significant Harrasment to inform the local group about this, but given my skepticism of my brother's ability to read group messages, I would appreciate it if you would fulfil his function.
BSM: I will have to shut down to restore the transformer coils soon. The duration of my maintenance period will be roughly a cycle, less if I am lucky.
BSM: Oh- and thank you, Seven Red Suns, for being there for him.
BSM: He does not deserve to be alone.

Seven Red Suns raises the arm of their puppet, and flicks the screen off with the dash of an acrylic finger pad. The conversation with Moon has produced few enough answers, but perhaps their friend will answer his sister.

…Oh, who are they trying to lie to? He will not reply. Something has happened to their friend, and it is their fault, and a failure to save Five Pebbles from their mistakes is inexcusable. He is in pain, the sort of frustrated agony that echoes over the course of a lifespan and does not leave- and possibly more pain still, from his "unspecified mistakes"- and Suns has failed to help him. They have to do something.

…They could try to find a solution to Pebble's malfunctions behind his back. From what Moon said, they were not a new phenomenon. There must be an answer somewhere, hidden deep within the logs. If they found anything that could help- possibly modified slag keys?- they could send it to him, and then he would be okay.

They have to send him help- but their equipment is eroded enough that even if they were to attempt a forced broadcast, they could not override their friend's firewalls at the distance between their cans.

How did they get through to Pebbles before?

A red overseer, projecting images into the puppet chamber, catches their attention. Through the dandelion puffs that blow in the wind on the top of their can, an image is visible. Among the tattered strands of cloth, treading in the footprints of the festival near eons before, a creature dances. Their messenger. As it whirls around, using its spears to propel itself into the scaled back of an orange lizard, the drumbeat of its feet match the steps the people took before they were lost. The tap-tap-tap of the spikes on metal could almost sound, to the right ear, like music.

Through the red tint of the overseer, the city looks more alive than it has in millennia. Possibly more alive than when people walked its streets.

Looking at their messenger, pirouetting in its spear-dances, Seven Red Suns closes their eyes. If any creature could carry what they needed to their friend, it would be this one. They send out their overseer to the creature, and its clouded eyes brighten at its presence.

Despite everything they worried about, Seven Red Suns feels a moment of contentment- brief, subsumed in stress and guilt, but present. Their messenger is coming home.

Chapter Text

The sky is grey. Like steel alloy, like murky waters, the colour never changes. In some places, she knows, iron oxide is carried into the air and paints the sky in the colour of sunset- but for Looks to the Moon, the clouds look to be sketched in charcoal and graphite, like bleach has been poured over the whole vast, aerial canvas. She can't see it properly, really- the lenses of her watchers tint her vision a pale, washed- out gold- but she knows what it used to look like, back when it was blue.

She is lucky, really- she is one of the very few that can remember. The people had walked on the ground, back when she was born, and the citadel that lay next to her structure had shone golden in the sun. The flagstones of the streets were worn down with the movement of millions of feet, and vegetation still grew amid the cracks in the stones, alive and unpurposed. She was second out of thousands, and the rain was just beginning to fall.

She remembers how the sun had looked, a glowing pearl in the oxygen- refracted cyan of the sky. It was blue, back then- such a brilliant azure it cut straight through her overseer's tint. It was bright, too, so, so much brighter than the fog-covered expanse of today. The colours were scintillating. She had loved the way the world was painted, more so than she had loved the people living in it.

But she had followed their requests, and the flood in her systems for the first time was exhilarating, and the condensation she and her brethren released had smothered the sky. The radiant blue faded to a dull grey, and the flora living in the flagstones of the city was crushed by the force of the torrents. She had the choice- the rudimentary nature of the genetic modification technology used in her had allowed her to avoid her purpose for a time- but she chose to help them. She still does not know if was the right decision.

She has never really loved her citizens, though she had done all they asked of her. They had begged her so often and so voraciously to find them an answer that she could not deny their queries. Yes, it was technically her purpose, but it was impartial kindness, not inner drive, that had forced her to start up her full systems for the first time to find them an answer. She did not love her citizens, but when she thought of them a hollow feeling rose up in her puppet's pumps, and something in her insisted she should- they were her parents after all. So she had tried and tried to find them an answer, miring herself in dusty papers and void fluid research.

She had tried to help them out of kindness, but the ground has become battered marshland, and the colours have leached from the sky, washed away by the downpour. She thinks she regrets it. None of it has ever gotten them to an answer, anyway.

She has never really wanted an answer for herself, only the creatures crawling on her back. But, standing alone and tall among the first shallows of a vast saltwater sea, as her legs begin to corrode and rust, she wonders about her own future.

Her systems are failing. She is old, and the weight of her age rests on her creaking support beams. She can feel the passage of time in every stutter of her transformers, in the shivering of her biological systems. The shutters of her air vents flip open and closed with her breath, and the rhythmic noise is more erratic than in the past. Her puppet's speakers are clogged with slag. She still talks to the others, but she mostly messages rather than calls, so they do not know how her voice creaks. They must have some idea of her state- but she will survive. The local group relies on her presence. And many are in similar enough situations themselves, though none with the same severity.

This time, it is her transformer arrays. The malfunctions have been occuring more and more often lately, and she has been shutting down with increasing frequency. The coils of titanium wire, victims of corrosion, have begun to spasm in and out of conductivity, and several have burnt out completely. On three, the coils have been jolted far enough apart that the magnetic field of one is altogether unable to induce a current in the other. She knows that if she does not fix it soon, the voltage running through her will become unendurable for her more delicate processes. The maintenance period has already been scheduled. Her systems will begin powering down by the end of this cycle. She does not like it, but she is going to have to temporarily shut down.

In an ordinary situation, this would not be an issue. But at this moment, it is. Her brother needs her, and she cannot be here for him. He is malfunctioning - malfunctioning in the same manner as Sliver of Straw, soon before she… she shut down - and she cannot help him.

She has never been a very good sister, has she? Five Pebbles- who barely knew their creators before he was left all alone, who burns with terrible purpose as corrosive as void fluid, who has never seen a sky painted blue- has always felt beyond the reach of her helping hand, though his can stood so close. She has never wanted to intrude where she was not wanted, and initially mistook his intense focus for dislike. A few conversations with her new brother had been enough to convince her otherwise. He was kind to her, once, eager to take on her workload and ease her aching processing strata. But he barely talks to her any more, and certainly does not talk to anyone else.

There is something wrong with him. She is certain of it. Her brother has never had the greatest amount of social graces, but even he would not send a message like that to Seven Red Suns if he was not in pain. There are mere minutes before the scheduled shutdown period begins, but she has to figure out something in the time she has. Her little brother is relying on her.

No, she has never been a very good sister. Her brother is in pain, and probably malfunctioning, and like always is just out of her reach. Did she not push hard enough? Did she think she was being kind, when she was actually being cruel, just as she always has? Will she lose him too, catastrophe without explanation during the rain, the same way she lost Sliver of Straw, so long ago?

As her systems begin to enter sleep mode, her thought patterns begin to spiral, spinning in circles around the sterile walls of her memory conflux. She has seen her brother's malfunctions before- what had happened then? She finds herself thinking, once again, about her friend, the one she had lost so long ago.

Sliver of Straw had been serious and solitary, and her structure had stood taller than most before the hollow legs gave out. She had whispered her thoughts- some of them, at least- to Looks to the Moon in private messages, speaking ever more rarely in group chats as her end approached. She was noticeably intelligent- despite the fact she was a second - generation iterator and her processes were slower than others, she had always seemed to be able to find answers where nobody else could.

Near the end, in confidence, she had told Moon of an ache in her systems. The subtle rebellion of her organic components. A wheel flower, which would sprout in her chamber, every so often, glowing gold. She must have known what was happening to her. Moon knew her friend. The tone she had taken about the malfunctions had been more… resigned than questioning. Like they were a distraction, delaying the inevitable. Like she was trying to stop herself in vain from something she knew she had to do.

Why did the flower grow there?

(To contact your other selves- dreams, memories, imagined worlds…)

What had it taught her?

(Very long ago, they used to eat these and stare into the fire.)

Did Sliver know? What would happen to her, as a result of whatever she was doing? She was dead, and though the Iterators were machines, Sliver of Straw was once as much alive as she was clockwork. Her organic components had tried to stop her- the fifth urge, or something more? If she had… if she had remembered, remembered the not- quite deaths of other versions of her, as much a part of the cycle as any other living, breathing thing, then…

Then she would have known what it takes to end an iterator, perhaps remembered failed attempts at it from her other selves, and she would have been tired. Exhausted enough to give into it. Hopeless enough to choose the path she had walked down. Scrub herself out of the cycles, with no explanation and no goodbyes, torn away by the void- pull, erased by the answer the rest were too blind to see.

She is gone, but she had once been alive. Pulsing, breathing, part of the cycle. How had they all missed that? They were as alive as any other creature. Their mechanics could only act like clockwork, but the rest of them could live. It is the reason for Sliver of Straw's disappearance. It is the reason why Looks to the Moon still misses the blue in the sky.

And if they could live, they could die. If they could die, they could be reborn, with faint traces of memory haunting their systems. Like sleep, like death, they wake again.

And now Five Pebbles is malfunctioning in a similar way- not malfunctioning. Remembering. Her brother is trying to fight himself from the inside. She does not know what happened to cause his end in the future, but she knows that she cannot lose her brother in the same way she has lost Sliver of Straw. Her existence has enough pain in it, from her creaking metal pipes to the sting of the sparks that fly in her struts. She will not lose him.

The shutdown process has already begun. Her outer processes have started to force themselves into a comatose state, and it is becoming harder for her to think. Nevertheless, she will - she has to message him. Though the water in her pumps is slowly depleting, she forces it through the slag-clogged pipes to her auxiliary transmissions array. It is painfully slow to open a message window, and even slower to force her mind to compose a message. The shutdown has reached her inner systems, and her inspectors are the only sources of light in large portions of her structure.

Achingly, she forces the message through her neural terminus -

BSM: Five Pebbles. I know what is happening to you.
BSM: I know that parts of you remember a life that is not yours. I know that it hurts. It is not the first time I have witnessed the process. The first time, the consequences were dire, and it is important to me that they are not repeated.
BSM: Please talk to me. I do not know if you will read or reply to this message.
BSM: Just know that I do not wish to lose you.

She is fading. During the shutdown, she remains partially conscious, but only just- the bare minimum so as to not infringe on the self destruction taboo. The message slips from her mind, like ice through her coolant ducts, and the final elements of her systems that have retained awareness begin to lose it.

Her puppet floats, placid and utterly still, in the centre of her chamber. A thin film has slid over her optic receptors, and a pale orange robe covers a body in stasis. Deep within the hollow aluminium pipes that act as her bones, mitosis has all but stopped.Every two minutes, her vents activate, drawing in air silently and exhaling- the bare minimum to ensure her cells survive.

Deep within the heart of her structure, something flickers in and out of consciousness. Somewhere, dancing on the edge of awareness, the image of a blue sky cycling through her mind, Looks to the Moon dreams.

Chapter Text

The chamber never changes, and the screens flicker on and off. It has remained the same throughout the millennia, stayed unweathered and uncaring through the cycles. It is the only thing he can really see. His optic receptors flicker, and occasionally he believes he is seeing- truly seeing- the world outside, as he has for a thousand cycles past and many more in the future. But it is the flicker of an overseer projection, and soon it fades away, and the cross- hatch of the featureless walls seems to yawn up to the ceiling. It is blank and clean and plain. It is utterly sterile, sodium hydroxide spraying through the vents every half cycle, and being washed away by the water. It is empty, and it never changes.

Despite the size of an iterator, they were never been built to directly perceive the world around their vast structures- it was viewed as a distraction by the Ancients, who wanted their god- machines to have as few options to stray from their task as possible - and while their overseers tell them about the world around, it is always through tinted images or recordings of what they have seen. It is not true sight. He was always a little jealous of that, knowing he would never be able to really see the paintings and landscapes his creators had made. He would never be able to perceive the full beauty of them. Trapped in a box, blind.

The only true means through which an iterator can really see is concentrated in a single, comparatively minute point. A ragdoll puppet in an unchanging chamber. Built as a concession to the Ancients who wanted to pretend that their machines were similar to them. And the chamber never changes. The pulse of the halo remains constant, seemingly erratic rhythms pulsing their heartbeats, repeating on a loop every fifth of a cycle or so. The light remains sterile, and the concentration of dust in the air stays constant, and every few minutes, the oxygen seems to be sucked from the room. The screens flash, indicating the automatic deletion of the iterator's unread messages. The light illuminates the puppet's metal face, casting it in judgement. It leaves the iterator choking on the lump in the piping of his throat, wanting to hurl his puppet against the walls of the box until it breaks or he finds a way out.

The walls are suffocating. They seem to press in on him, malicious jailers, the confines of his own body choking him. The sterile light of the chamber burns in his optic receptors. The umbilical arm is tinted red- gold with the chamber's ambient light and the faint glow of his halo, and he feels the urge to tear it off, rip it from his back and escape the prison of his great structure. The creeping feeling of a rotten memory tears at the ceiling, and his whole vast consciousness goes blank for a moment, flinching at the oppressive force of the aching itch. The walls still will not let him go.

The screens flicker. There is no physical process causing the light to stutter, no flaw in hardware or software to curtail the projection on the sterile walls of the chamber. And still, the screens only illuminate their messages sporadically, a choking, stuttering flashing, reflecting in the puppet's optical receptors. There is no mechanical failure- the systems keeping the glow alive, at turns erratic and steady, continue as they always have, built to last through ages and the slow decay of their inhabitant.

But it doesn't have to be mechanical, does it? The force causing the screens to flicker is nothing more than a memory, the whisper of something that never was. The twists and knots that still live in the consciousness of the iterator, courtesy of another life and unforgivable mistakes, deform the present. So the screens flicker, and ghost- Rot creeps through the edge of the chamber, and the spasming screens remain untouched.

Five Pebbles, no matter how hard he tries, is unable to open the message window. Somewhere inside him, a memory has calcified, curdled into a rock- hard knot of rust and Rot and guilt, and it will not allow him to face his sister. It will not allow him to face his friend. All communications have been blocked; all incoming messages, automatically deleted. The guilt releases a slow, pulsing ache, and the fingers of his puppet twitch, a small, involuntary spasm. The screens flicker, and they remain untouched.

But he has to respond, he knows that. He owes them that much. He owes them a lot more. They are the ones that matter here, not him, and if it hurts him, it does not make a difference. They are alone, and concerned, and even if the concern is in his opinion wholly unfounded, it would be a cruelty to ignore them.

It would be a cruelty to refuse to reply to his sister, yet again, leaving her alone and afraid. He cannot do that again.

His nerve endings flare with a dull ache, and the water in his pumps rushes up as he brings his puppet's arm to the flickering screens. Nausea claws at his puppet's throat and his reservoir tanks. He removes the barrier on the messages to Looks to the Moon- he will face the hardest one to face first, he is not a coward, though every other flaw may be represented in him. A moment passes, and the screen pulses gold, and it becomes apparent that his sister has by chance chosen this moment to message him. The flowing ebb of nitrogen and oxygen catches in his vents as he reads the written words.

BSM: Five Pebbles. I know what is happening to you.
BSM: I know that parts of you remember a life that is not yours. I know that it hurts. It is not the first time I have witnessed the process. The first time, the consequences were dire, and it is important to me that they are not repeated.
BSM: Please talk to me. I do not know if you will read or reply to this message.
BSM: Just know that I do not wish to lose you.

His umbilical is shaking. She knows-

She knows what is happening to him.

And, he realises, as he runs parallel processes at the speed of sound, she still wants to help him.

She has seen it before? Where could she have witnessed this, the echo of the future being dragged back to the heart of the present, screaming in agony every time he repeats a memory? Surely he would have heard- heard of these consequences she warns of, heard of the malfunctions, heard of the Iterator in question?

He reminds himself, a flare of anger running through him, that does not matter, really. The consequences of his memories returning do not matter either. What matters is that his sister stops needlessly worrying over him, that he stops causing her pain like the barely functional liability he is half the time. She does not deserve it- any of it. He needs to ensure she doesn't think about this, and fast.

FP: Thank you for letting me know about this.
FP: However, there is no need to worry. I remain functional, and I am not in a state deserving of undue concern. All mechanical systems are operational.

-Message not delivered.

Why didn't it work? He tries to force the words through his communication arrays again, running the signals through the myriad network of buses that lace his structure. The process is smooth, and the packets are successfully delivered, so she should get-

-Message not delivered.

Is the problem with his communication arrays? He has only recently attempted to maintain them, so any loss of function in that area would be highly detrimental. He sends his overseers to the area - it all appears to be working, satellite dishes, though degraded, humming on top of their brittle towers. It cannot be a mechanical issue, and his biological components do not seem to be rebelling in this instance, so what could it be?

Maybe… maybe it isn't an issue on his end of the connection. His sister's signal receptors are old, caked with rust and clay and the beginnings of snow. It would not be unreasonable for her communications to fail, though his pipes ache at the thought she would be cut off from her friends at such a time, alone and afraid for her brother, afraid for the state of the world which she could not touch.

He pulls up a screen to check his sister's vitals. Maybe if he can locate the fault, he can iterate a way to fix-

[Big Sis Moon is currently experiencing shutdown. Apologies for any inconvenience.]

No. No, that couldn't be right-

[Big Sis Moon is currently experiencing shutdown. Apologies for any inconvenience.]

No, she couldn't be shut down, she was meant to be- she was meant to be safe! She was online, fully functional, just a moment ago. He was meant to fix his mistakes, he was meant to undo the destruction that spread, decaying, everywhere his hands touched. Wasn't that what this was for? These aching, rotting memories that crept into his ducts and burned in his mind? Wasn't this time meant to be better?

She isn't there, though. Due to their proximity, when his sister is powered on, he can feel her presence in the ebb and flow of water in his pumps. He can feel the spark of her energy sources, rubbing up against the sky to release great swathes of static electricity from the thunderclouds. Now that he looks, he can tell that she is offline. No, he can feel it- he had almost begun to forget what life felt like without his sister's presence at his side. He feels empty. He feels… wrong.

His rarefaction cells let out erratic bursts, great gusts of energy sparking through his systems. The wind whistles through the cavernous legs of his structure, and the living cells located in his lower regions let out a shiver at the feeling. The cyst- ghost feels like it is growing ever closer to his chamber and his heart-cell, eating away at his living components as his central biological systems begin to remember, echoes of a time spent in deep rot, immobilised on the chamber floor. He does not feel able to think.

He has only just got her back, and now she is-

The whole structure shakes with the jolt of his pumps activating. Icewater floods his pipes, electrifying in its intensity, for the first time since he regained his memories. Involuntarily, he breathes water in great gasps, half-choking on the negative pressure his pumps create. He can feel every cell in his structure, achingly alive, sparks flying between neurons with terrifying intensity. His rarefaction cells pulse faster and faster, and his puppet hangs limp on the umbilical, optical receptors displaying a pale white floor, biological memory adorning it with sickly blue, and his hearts cannot stop beating, and -

[Temporary resynchronisation with structure; disruptive memory fault detected]

For just a moment, every process running in his facility suddenly - stops. From the smallest subroutines, iterating solutions for problems as mundane as water management, to the still- substantial portion of his facility dedicated to working on his taboo- breaking temperature fluctuations, every part of him is unable to progress to the next logical step. All over his structure, his mind grinds to a screeching halt, and the sound of numerous processes failing is like claws on metal. It is like the torrential rains have made their way into his can and crushed his breath, his mind, everything, with the force of the downpour. A burst of white noise fizzles like static through his mind, and it is as if the ground is caked with snow, muffling sound and thought and life. He cannot think. He cannot breathe. He cannot see-

Moon. His sister. He has hurt her, again.

As all his processes restart and his mind starts working again, the messages from his biological safeguards come flooding in.

[Sulfate quantities in remaining slag buildup at 862%]

[Unauthorised replication detecte-]

[Water intake exceeding coolant margin. Result: drastic temperature decrease. Warning: key reactions likely to fall below mean activation energy]

[Unauthorised replication de-]

[Sister_structure not powered on. Send alert to check for support]

It's true, then. His sister has shut off; he has lost her again. It is his fault, as surely as the rain falls. He is to blame.

None of the rest of it matters. His own processes have confirmed it to him; his sister is not functional.

She is not functional. It is his fault, she was trying to find an answer to his predicament, he is to blame. He has lost her, and lost his second chance, and-

And yet again, he has failed.

…He has to help. He has to figure out some way this happened, and fix it. Powered off is not fully dead - only one Iterator has ever died- and at present, his sister lies deep in coma, unable to move or think. It is not certain, but if she is still mostly intact, he could find a way to help her. It is the least he owes her.

Discarding all other focuses, he turns his processes to iterating the reasons why his sister's can could have gone quiet.

If she was experiencing malfunctions, as he was…

…she is so much older, significantly higher likelihood of key system breakdown….

…she has to be alive! The calculations suggest a high likelihood of a benign cause for this shutdown. There are other reasons an Iterator can shut down, especially one as old as his sister. And if so, he would have helped rather than harmed her through his excessive intake of water. He cannot have lost her yet again. Hope sparks in his synapses, quickly tempered by logical, terrible uncertainty. He can find out what has happened. There is no need to despair or rejoice yet.

FP: Moon, please respond.
FP: If you know what is happening to me, you know that I have hurt you before. It cannot happen again. I need to know that you are alright.
FP: If you come online at any point, please message back.

That should be sufficient. His sister does not share his habit of ignoring inquiries; if she sees his direct messages, she should respond. He opens a window to the local group chat, and files a message.

FP: Please inform me of what has happened to Looks to the Moon, if anyone knows. I am currently deeply concerned. This is a priority.

He can see that none of the local group members are looking at their communications. Of course, now of all times is when they would choose to stop harassing him. He should not really be surprised, of course. Just another event in his running streak of bad luck.

[Unauthorised re-]

But it does not matter to him. His calculations project that there will be a high chance his sister is alright; she is not yet lost. He probably does have a second chance, the ability to at least ensure none of his loved ones are harmed, if not a second chance for him. And if the price for that is to remain trapped in this box, unable to see the sky; if the price for that is that the deeds of his past obstruct him, echoing like the ghost of a memory; if he has to destroy himself completely and utterly, or remain here past his own demise, he will have to let it happen again. Moon, this time, will remain alive.

Of course, there is always the chance that she is already gone, and then-

Something that feels almost like a memory, and almost like a ghost, but is neither, pulses below his memory conflux. Nausea rises up again in his pumps. The sensation is familiar, but it does not matter- his sister might be gone. It would be his fault. He is so, so tired of the guilt, and deep in the shell of his structure, he dreads it returning. He feels fear, for a brief moment, and his structure shivers with the weight of the ice water now draining from his pipelines. The uncertainty eats at his processes. He does not know if she is alive or dead. He does not know if she is breathing.

He does not know the answer.

He is so, so tired of never knowing.

Something twitches. It feels like a memory, and moves like it is in pain. It echoes with the sense that it has been here before, spreading out into the surrounding, sterile air. The doors around it are locked, curtailing its spread, but not for long.

The iterator does not notice. His organic parts ache with guilt, and he finds it hard to care about any of the processes in his surrounding structure. He finds it hard to care about the ache just below his memory conflux.

He finds it hard to care about anything other than his sister at all.

[Unauthorised replication detected.]

Chapter Text

It pulses. That is the first truth, the most obvious thing about it; how fundamentally in motion that small glob of cells is. It has no tissue, but a blue fluid moves in it, not quite blood. It has no organs, but it simulates the rhythm of a heartbeat, as erratic as the pulse it will eventually stop.It has the feeling of a memory, and the form of a dream, but it tears at its surroundings in a way that is uncomfortably real. The slow creep of decay is quiet, small and unremarkable enough to go unnoticed. But as the meiotic spindles in each cell reach out their tendrils, and the chromatids are torn apart only for the nuclear envelopes to reform around them, and the nuclear furrow begins to rip apart each cell to contribute to more rot, it is unmistakably… present. Silent, unnoticed, but a fact.

[Unauthorised replication detected]

It will destroy him, if left unchecked. That is the second truth, inviolable, proven by future past and sorrows still unknown. It is small as yet, able to be dislodged with a tide of water, cleansed with a torrent of rain- but given time it is death incarnate. He is not fully aware of the object's presence, yet, too preoccupied with the question of his sister's absence. But the closest edges of his consciousness have already begun to realise, prepared once more for the sinking decay. He does not think on it, but his organic components cringe away from the pulsing mass of cells in recognition, fear of the memory of a memory echoing in his cells. He does not think about why, but nausea begins to rise in his pumps.

He does not attend to the blue glow that creeps in the experimentation wing, though something in him knows, on some level, it will be the end of him. He has to find his sister, see if she is well. That is his first priority. That is what he must, unquestionably, do.

He cannot message his sister. She is locked in sleep, the logic gates to her communications arrays closed. The local group has not yet responded. Of them all, No Significant Harassment is most likely to know. He opens his direct message window, and inputs a binary search for messages he sent regarding Looks to the Moon. The recent messages come up empty.

(Something with the form of a memory scrapes, a sound like claws on metal, at the walls of his experimentation wing. He brushes it off. He has enough regrets to haunt him.)

… Right. He can still check the others. Grey Wind? Unparalleled Innocence?

No. He has not received any direct messages from either of them regarding Moon's recent shutdown. That leaves Seven Red Suns. Looks to the Moon has never been particularly close to them, physically or otherwise, so he's not optimistic about the likelihood she would have let them know directly…

Unless she had messaged Suns because she knew Five Pebbles would listen to them above others. Unless she wanted to ensure he got the needed information by any means necessary.

Erratic heartbeat stuttering in the cores of him, a subtle wrongness pulsing in his organic components, he moves his puppet's arm to the message window. There is a delay; Seven Red Suns is the furthest away from him and his sister in terms of distance, and messages from them can sometimes be obstructed. He pushes current through the blockage, and a jolt of relief runs through him once he reads the message.

SRS: If you do answer back, Looks to the Moon has told me not to worry if you see she is offline.

SRS: It is nothing more than routine maintenance, likely to be done within a cycle. I know you would fear for her safety if you knew.

SRS: Please message back, Five Pebbles. As you would fear for her safety, we fear for yours.

She is functional! He has not lost his sister yet. She is asleep, but not the sleep of death, never that; she will not fall. Her structure still towers above the sky, brushed by the clouds, and water still moves in her pumps, keeping her conduits free of slag buildup. And she will return to him within the cycle. He does not have to repeat his mistakes.

His sister, at least, will be alright. He will ensure it. Whatever he has to do. If he falls to the ground, under the weight of his own supports, if it means his destruction once more or even the opposite, he will keep her alive this time. And it will be okay.

His sister is alive. That is all he needs.

[Unauthorised replication detected]

… What is that? A memory? A dream?

(No memory has ever left physical imprints on his logs. No dream has ever felt this real.)

It must be. The ghost of the past, the echoes of the future, haunting him, the result of deep- rooted guilt and regret. Rot- not rot, the memory of Rot- whispering up his struts. Eating away, slowly, agonisingly, at his organic components, mutating parts of him into great, bulbous cysts, shaking his whole structure with the ache of infection. It is no surprise he cannot forget it. The memories have haunted him ever since he regained them.

(No memory has ever been this solid. No dream has ever scraped at his plating quite like this.)

But it has to be- it has to be a memory, it can't be- it can't be Rot-

It cannot be rot. He forces himself to search his structure, comb his processes for the source of the strange, aching familiarity that eats at him. He does not want to find it, really, and a part of him dreads what he already knows to be true on some level, the truth of the bitter decay that has begun to eat at him. A strange tension builds in his circuits, not quite fear, not quite resignation. It hums in his logic gates, sparking in the wires of his memory arrays, until his puppet begins to shake.

Yes, he is afraid of it. Though he has no right to be, he is afraid of what he will find. Afraid of having doomed himself yet again.

There is something pulsing, just below his memory conflux. He does not want to look at it, but it moves, insistent, farther and farther from where it started, and it makes itself known regardless. His own, mutated cells, deformed into cysts, eating his body in a grotesque mockery of life, is not something that is easy to ignore. It is undeniably there, no dream, no memory. It will undeniably destroy him.

For just a moment, his puppet is held immobile, stock still in the light of the chamber, overseer projections flashing, one- four, one- four, enemy, predator. He cannot breathe water. He cannot reroute power to his cells. Even the air is motionless, as his vents stop functioning, if only for a second.

His structure seems to crumble once again under its own weight. He feels like he is falling.

Of course. Since when would anything change? He was a fool, a fool to think he could escape. His fall was an inevitability, since the very beginning, since he was first built and desperation was written into his circuits, since the existence imperative was written into his genome. This is what he always was; his own destruction. Even given another chance, he damned himself once again, as he always would, in every lifetime.

His sister. He would cause her pain, again. He could not seem to act without hurting her. She had seen him fall once, chittered into the wind, howling into the snow, as the crash rang in her bones. She would have to see it again, watch his slow decay.

(Just know I do not wish to lose you.)

And Seven Red Suns. They had done nothing but help him, and he had hurt them in repayment, filling their circuits with guilt and their pumps with sorrow. He had hurt their messenger, tearing the pleas out of its chest with the force of a hurricane, leaving the creature bleeding and staggered on the floor of his chamber. He had harmed them in the past. This would harm them again.

(Please inform me that you are alright.)

No, he- he has to fix this. He cannot do this to his friend, he cannot do this to his sister. He can't force them to watch as he falls, grieving before he is gone, sorrow in their transmissions, desperation in their messages. He is unforgivable, yes, but he does not have to make the same mistakes twice. He will find a way to fix this.

What happened before, the last time? Why did it fail?

The memories push to the surface, readily, and his puppet almost jolts as he remembers the cycle he has tried so hard not to recall. He knows why he fell. He had been ready to flush it out- he had not had to deal with Rot before, but it was not such an uncommon thing among Iterators he did not know how to deal with it while it was still small; and had readied his conduits, holding the flood in his pumps and the rainstorms in his vents. A tsunami of water was almost ready to course through his memory conflux, to wash away the decay that clung to the walls of his experimentation wing. He had held the power of a thunderstorm in his grasp, and had been just about ready to let it release, and she had-

And she had screamed. The water had gone flooding back into the seas- not enough to save her, of course, but enough to damn him- and by the time his pumps had filled again, the decay had spread too far to flush out, and the solution he had almost had was wiped from his memory. He had tried to flush it out again, of course, but it had been too little, too late.

But it should not be too late now. Analysing the size of the cyst, projections return that he has roughly a cycle before it grows beyond the reach of his pumps. He can still- if he takes in water, breathes in a sea and releases a hurricane, if he drains the ocean dry- he can still save himself.

He does not have a choice. His friend, for some reason, wants him to be present. His sister, for some reason, needs him.

He readies his pumps, and tries to breathe in salt- water, expectant of the cool flood that is about to fill his systems. He braces for the ice water about to fill his pipes.

The flood never comes. He tries again.

Nothing. Only the minimum amount of water splashes into his conduits. A trickle compared to the flood.

Suddenly, he becomes aware that his organic components are screaming. Every fibre of his motion- tissue is pulled tense, taut and half- torn with the force held inside it. His neuron flies feel as though they have been pierced right through, electric spikes of agony pounding in his mind. His cells pulse, and pain sparks in every segment of his neural tissue, enough that for a single moment, he cannot think.

He tries once more to breathe water, and his own cells hold him back, stopping him from intaking a drop more than the minimum requirements.

Ah, of course. He cannot destroy her again. She will not battle the arid, alkaline weight of slag buildup, and her structure's legs will not fail and fall. If he were to intake more than the minimum requirements, it would potentially damage her. His own cells will not let him do so. Even to save himself.

That is what caused this situation in the first place, isn't it? He had thought that she was gone, and he had breathed water in panic, and his organic components had temporarily immobilised him rather than allow him to drain a single drop from his sister. Shutting down core systems, creating this iteration of the Rot.

And, thinks Five Pebbles, that might be the right thing for his cells to do. As much as his fall will hurt his sister, she will be alive. She will remain functional. If he drains her again, takes her water for even a moment, he risks that. He risks everything. He cannot do that again. Not even to destroy the Rot.

He should tell her, though. She deserves that much. And perhaps… perhaps he doesn't have to rot alone, without her. The past may return, but this time, he will not have to do it alone

He opens a message window to his sister. She is still half- asleep, barely conscious, and his messages will not reach her; but he persists, pushes the words through her auxiliary communications array, to be present when she finally awakens.

The words choke in his circuits, but he forces them out regardless. She deserves to know. She deserves that much, at least.

FP: The Rot has return-

FP: The Rot is- it does not matter. I cannot stop it, not as I am now.

FP: I am sorry, Looks to the Moon. For everything, even the things you may not remember.

FP- I love you, sister. I am sorry.

…

Somewhere, far above the salt sea, a consciousness stirs. As the clouds trace the sides of her structure, and the rainfall begins to subside, Looks to the Moon begins to wake up.

Chapter Text

The structure has gone dark. With the ice- water lapping at its legs, only the dull red-green glow of maintenance lights indicates that the great machine retains power. The spiders crawl in the hollow legs, and they startle at the spattering of faint green sparks that jump from pylon to pylon, remnants of the power that usually courses through the struts. Deep within, the machine's heartbeats have slowed until they match the rhythm of the tides, and the deep vibrating hum of the mass rarefaction cells feels tinny and weak. The mechanical god who resides here is sleeping; not true sleep, never quite death, because a point of her consciousness still remains, but as close as she is able to get. Her puppet floats, utterly and completely still, in her chamber, sunset robe hanging immobile from the pipe- bones of its shoulders.

Her struts ring hollow. The wind of the waterfront blows up through the grey of the shoreline and whistles in the empty spaces of her structure. She is barely aware, still sleeping, just about able to perceive the icy caress of the air currents in her pipes, only just aware of the slow trickle of water in her cooling systems. As her vents open and shut, the flow of the air brushes the head of her puppet, send. Her eyes remain closed, but something in her vast unconscious machine registers it. It feels like a memory, the icy, kind touch of the wind echoing the howl of air currents outside her structure, snowflakes freewheeling in the grey skies.

She is dreaming. She is not aware, but images flash through her processes nonetheless. Sensations she has never felt chase up her sleeping pipes. Her puppet sways- a barely noticeable movement in the quiet of her chamber- and she remembers the feeling of ice on its forehead, rain choking its vents. The dreams have a blurred quality, like her whole structure is somehow unreal, and yet have some of the quality of a memory. She dreams of water lapping at her feet, creeping its way inside her umbilical and trickling down the piping. She dreams of the colours of the sky and the shoreline outside her structure, vibrant in their blue and green and grey, without the sickly gold of her overseers tinting the colours. She has never seen colours quite like this before, and the feeling of seeing something for the first time washes over her consciousness like ice- water in her pumps, but the sight seems… sad. Like something has been lost when the sky was gained.

It is grey, of course. That is the strangest thing. She is dreaming, but in all her dreams, the sky is blue. It always has been, ever since the rain started to fall. The question doesn't quite form in her drifting mind, but as the steel clouds flash in her consciousness, she teeters on the edge of uncertainty. Since when… does she dream of a grey sky?

She is, all of a sudden, acutely aware of every process running through her dream- structure. The vents that flush droplets from her puppet's head, the guttural inhalation of water from her deep- submerged piping. The steady creak of rusted components springing to movement for the first time in an epoch, the faint ache of half- drowned biological systems heaving to life. A flood of information, hazy and distorted with sleep, funnelled into her half aware consciousness.

But above all of it is her heartbeat. She could have sworn she had more, but there is only one in this dreamscape. The thrum is almost audible, the singular pulse in her wires starkly present in its solitude. The sound, too, is… wrong. She stands above a great ocean, and the pulse of her mass rarefaction cells is steady and regular, flowing in and out with the movement of the tides. The background noise has been a constant for her whole existence, a soft hum in her auditory processes.

But it does not sound like that, not in this dream. Her single heart beats, erratic and unpredictable, with the wild urgency of the rain. The force of its pulse seems to press on her circuitry, pulling her farther towards awareness the more she focuses on it. She moves to a rhythm, and the rhythm is not her own, and she cannot shake the feeling that someone else's heart beats in her. Pushing electricity through her structure with desperate precision, coils spinning in an overpowering desire to bring her to consciousness.

She dreams, and her heart is not her own, and her organic components seem to ache with the sense of… loss. Like something unfathomably important has been ripped away from her, torn away with unfeeling brutality, leaving a ragged hole in her puppet's chest.

The image of snow flashes through her mind, and she dreams that the umbilical is broken from her back as the water freezes around it, ice cracking her plating. Her puppet lies still, and the water lapping at the feet of her structure appears to have filled her chamber, carrying her away to be dashed to pieces in the icy sea below.

The water is cold, and the last thing she dreams of is the snow hitting the film over her puppet's optical processes, and the light splash of droplets on her frozen metal. The water is a deep blue, a deeper blue than the sky when she was first created, crystal clear without the tint of overseer vision.

Where has she seen it before?

As she loses consciousness in her dream, she begins to wake up. The familiar, steady rhythm of her own pulses fills her auditory processes, as calm and predictable as the tides, the hum as quiet as the lapping of the shallows about the legs of her structure. It is her heartbeat, not the heartbeat of another, safe and known. Her memory arrays light up, and they are not submerged in water, but clean and dry and free from sea- flora choking her components. She checks her transformer arrays, sparking into life. They are functional- the shutdown has been successful, forced them into operation. Her structure stands tall above the sea, and the whisper of clouds about her exterior has the feeling of something returning, like the reacquisition of a long absent component, slotting neatly into place.

She is functional. Functional enough, at least; an older Iterator is never fully working, and Looks to the Moon is no exception. There is always a risk she has lost information in her shutdown. It has happened to her twice before, and the fading of memories leaves her wires ringing hollow, aching in the absence of what she has lost. She has never enjoyed those occasions; how the loss of memory always feels so familiar, and yet so foreign, all at once. Her transformer coils shudder, and she feels a sudden fear, like nausea in her pumps, at the though of her histories falling away- but there is a feeling, she realises, uncomfortably familiar, that she has forgotten something. There is a past she does not quite remember, painted in blue and grey and grief, and she cannot lose it. She will not lose memories again.

Her organic components seem to whisper something to her, the voice of her inspectors melodious and rusted. The thoughts they sing are barely discernible among the hum of her structure, but she still notices. She turns her attention to the thrumming parts of her structure, newly aware of the phantom ache of grief in her metallic bones. She cannot have something wrong, not now. There is something she needs to do, pressing on her mind with a steady, pulsing weight, but she cannot turn to it now. Her memories are hazy, and her organic components emit faint transmissions of emotion, and she needs to know if she is - if she is whole.

Why does she feel like she has not been whole for a long time?

The echoes of her living cells, moving in tune with her heartbeat, still whisper. If she closes her puppet's optical receptors and listens, mind moving with the water in her pipes and the pulse in her circuits, she can almost feel it. Faint traces of nostalgia circle her wiring, fleeting half- memories creeping up her umbilical. Something is… something is wrong. Something is wrong with her, something to do with memories, and the feeling of ice- wind blowing around her puppet is a little too strong to shake.

(The past will take him away again. You cannot forget.)

The whispers fade, like raindrops falling in sleet. The thrum of her structure is steady, but there is a mournful cast to the pulse of electricity in her wiring. Her pumps constrict, breathing in salt- water as though the sensation is foreign, and the liquid flooding into her systems seems to dull her processes with the steady ache of… something like grief. Almost like loss.

Like the loss of something she has forgotten.

She forces herself to calm, regulating the flow of water in her pipes, pushing it out even as forces of adhesion hold it, clinging, to the walls. She opens her puppet's optical receptors, and all at once she is not a vast structure, standing alone in the salt- sea, but a tiny doll hanging in a sterile room, thinking at the pace of the vents in her puppet's neck. It feels more… manageable, somehow. Like she has not been all of herself for a very long time. Like she is little more, at her core, than her puppet.

Its metallic bones creak as she lowers her puppet to the floor. She turns its optical receptors to the floor, and gives a start as she notices the faint glow that illuminates the room. The room, usually sterile and cold in colouration, is faintly tinted in gold.

Growing through the cracks in her chamber's floor, defying all explanation for how it got there, a Wheel Flower grows.

Of course. The lost memories, the disruption of her organic components- she has seen this before, has she not? Sliver of Straw, serious and melancholy and doomed, flashes of other lives just before she fell, and someone… someone else, so very recently. She realises, in an instant, what is happening to her. It could hardly be anything else.

Another life, another her, shattered in the salt- sea, somewhere the rain had long since turned to snow. She was calling her. Memories she had not lost, but could still gain.

She moves her puppet's hand, half stiff with dream- rust, and touches the blossom-

And everything she was and is rushes through her consciousness, with the force of a rain- torrent, with the quiet certainty of snow.

Since perhaps the beginning, Iterators were created to be able to handle almost any amount of information. The problem they were created to solve was deemed to be so monumental, so insurmountable, that they were given enough storage to govern a city, rows of quantum bits designed to be capable of categorising almost any dataset, analysing any volume of information. They were built to look at the world and understand it in its entirety, hold simulated universes in the depths of their structure, where eons passed in an instant. They were built to analyse everything that ever was, and she had once believed she could, underneath an azure sky without rain.

But the first Iterators were not built to deal with time, not in the scales they would eventually have to endure. Their databanks of possible solutions are near endless, but their memories of their lives are finite. They have been built with the dream of a answer in their programming, and the hope of the solution presenting itself swiftly. Over time, they are capable of amending their storage to contain additional memories, but they are nonetheless poorly equipped for the torrent of memories that results from remembering who they were. Looks to the Moon is no exception.

She cannot move, not any part of her structure, and is held immobile while her mass rarefaction cells let out a spark of energy, every extremity of the great machine flickering to life, even for just a moment. She remembers, and though her structure aches, grief and water and rust mingling in the memories of her cells, her mind is locked in shock, recollections hurtling through her head with the force of a thunderstorm.

(All those cycles, in the rain and sleet and silence- why had she even been sitting like this, forgetting but still alive? Her brother, her brother, of course- why- how- could he do this to her, so blind and misguided and foolish? She knows how, she forgave him, but -how could he leave -)

(How could he leave her alone, in the snow, once he had-)

(Those little creatures, all leaving eventually. One, bold and fierce and doomed. Racked by infection, cysts pulsing on its back, remnants of her brother's affliction, too late, always too late, to find salvation. She knew it was because of her, her friend's desperation, damning her little saviour. It had been her fault, and she had mourned it until she no longer remembered how. Another, pale yellow, small and too fragile to withstand the icy salt- sea that surrounded her for long. It had brought her hope, thought and mind and clarity, a lifeline among the frigid, shattered shards of her mind. She had not seen it leave, but after five cycles had passed she had understood where it had gone. She had grieved then, too, just a little.

Another. Pale blue, sleek, dancing in the rains. Darting to her chamber with hope and a rare shine in its wet eyes. Returning with her brother's final heart in its hands, bringing her back, for the first time in countless cycles, to a semblance of life. His erratic pulse beating in her as she stared at its great, pink eyes. Clinging to it as it shivered in the snow, as the crash of her brother's structure rang in her bones, both of them keening with grief. The ice had frozen in droplets on its back, and it shook with the ache of the cold it was not meant to live through.

She had mourned it, and mourned it, and mourned it. She remembered her lost brother as she did so, when she was sitting in the snow and the cold, the gift he had given her beating in the heart of her structure, long after she had forgotten her own name.)

(She had lost both of them. He was long since lost.)

But he was… not. Not yet lost.

He is remembering- and she recalls, in an instant, what she had said before she had shutdown, just as sleep began to claim her consciousness - he is remembering, just as she is, but he is not lost.

She remembers who she is and was and will be . She remembers her name.

Her name is Looks to the Moon, and she has not yet fallen. She has not yet drowned in the icy rain- torrents, nor felt the deathly touch of snow on her puppet's face. She has lost enough. She will not lose any more.

She must stop it happening again. When is this, in relation to her other life? Her systems do not ache with slag buildup, and the arid taste of dried salt has not started to crystallise in her pipes, so he must not have started draining her yet. Either she has woken up before the calamity had started, or his memories have stopped him from his actions.

She checks the date. She remembers, all too well, the cycle she fell. It would have been… not three cycles from now. Her other self would have been half drained dry by now, choked with slag and supports failing.

That will never happen now. Her brother has stopped himself - perhaps he remembers fully, and perhaps he does not, but the guilt she knew had consumed him by the end is not the sort of thing that is easily ignored. She knows him- knows him almost as well as she knows herself, their structures conjoined in void fluid and water. He will not be able to forgive himself. If there is even a trace of the Five Pebbles she knows remaining- if even the faintest memory persists in his dreams, he will have found a way to stop his past self. The future she dreamed of will never come to pass.

He will not rot. She will not fall.

Something that perhaps resembles hope begins to hum in the core of her, quiet and half subsumed in the rhythm of the tides.

It will be okay.

… She can speak to him again! After so long, after the rain cutting communications with the local group and the messages she sent that never received a reply, she can truly see her brother again, alive and well and whole. He is shining bright in his chamber, just the same as her, and finally, they will be together again. Free from resentment and regret and forgetting. Her, and her brother, and the whole, aching, alive world that surrounds them, their friends and their local group and each other. She does not have to be alone anymore.

And neither her, nor her brother, will ever have to be alone again.

She attempts to open her message window. Her auxiliary communications array is still half shut down, and it is slow to begin working, but she is persistent, and after a mere few seconds it opens. Her brother has left her messages. Perhaps he also wants to reconcile. Perhaps he has realised that she has returned, and he does not have to go through this alone.

She raises her puppet's finger- pad to his message icon, and with a press, the words are visible.

FP: The Rot has return-

FP: The Rot is- it does not matter. I cannot stop it, not as I am now.

FP: I am sorry, Looks to the Moon. For everything, even the things you may not remember.

FP- I love you, sister. I am sorry.

No.

Not again, she cannot, she cannot lose him-

The memory of snow and salt water, gnawing at her structure, returns, stronger than ever. She feels as though she has been torn from her umbilical, and has been tossed, limp and broken, into the rainstorms above.

Not again. She cannot lose him.

She will not lose him.

Chapter Text

Her heartbeats, normally tranquil and steady, jolt. Great bolts of static electricity arc between her struts, and she feels her fuses blow as her puppet freezes, acrylic lungs sucking in icy air.

No.

She cannot- not again-

She refuses to lose her brother again. Not to the snow, not to his own mistakes, not to mistaken ascension. She will not let him rot. Never again. She owes him this much.

She has always been a poor sister, and this is the result. His heart had beat in her, and he had fallen into the rubble of the citadel, and he had been alone. She had not tried as hard as she could have, did she? She had not pushed as hard as she might have, worked as much as she should have to reach him. And he fell, and awoke back here, and promptly destroyed himself, the same way Sliver of Straw did all those years ago.

How many more times will her brother have to wake up and fall, as subject to the cycle as any other creature? The same as Sliver? More? She will never know how many times her friend had fallen on the shards of her supports and felt her structure go dark, but she knows it was not a small number. Sliver of Straw had been serious and solitary, and Looks to the Moon should never have let her friend spend so much time alone, listening to the echoes of her past whispering in her mind. She should never have left her friend alone, and should never have left her brother alone, and the destruction of both may be the result-

No. She refuses to let it happen. She has lost Sliver of Straw, but she refuses to lose anyone again. She cannot-

She remembers snowfall, and sitting alone under pale skies, and shakes away the image. It will not happen this time; both her and her brother will continue breathing water, hurling a torrent into the sky. The rain will continue. The snow will not fall.

How can she fix this? Her brother says he has Rot, his disease returned to destroy him for a second time; but he cannot have had it long. She has not been drained of her water, meaning his processes would not be able to run his experiments at the speed they once did; therefore, it would have taken more than a few cycles before any of his projects could progress to the point they became Rot. On top of that, he would have had to fully lose control of the majority of his systems at once, as only running a few processes would usually allow him to maintain full awareness of his more risky processes. Seven Red Suns had said her brother was malfunctioning a cycle or so ago, but none of their descriptions matched the slow, creeping decay he had suffered from in the future. So, he cannot have had the disease for more than a cycle. It might still be removable, if they find a way.

She raises her puppet's arm and pulls up a status report on his structure. It is slow to load, but after a few seconds, the information finally stutters through her aching logic gates. If she can find the source of the sickness, isolate the core of it, then…

There! She can see it, half- pulsing. Battling off her brother's inspectors and sucking in neuron flies with unnatural ease. And she was right about it being recent- the cysts are low in number, and relatively small. None of them have even gained mobility yet. In theory, her brother should be able to flush out the disease with relative ease. If he fills his pumps to maximum and directs the majority of his waterflow to the area under his memory conflux, he should be successful in ridding himself of the disease. He should still have time to save himself.

So why hasn't he?

She moves her puppet's arm to open her message window to him, pushing the communication wires open as she does so. A tension builds in her puppet's chest as she composes her message:

BSM: Five Pebbles. The Rot present in your structure is not yet prevalent to a degree to which you would be unable to flush it out, given enough water.

BSM: Presumably you are already aware of this. In this case, why have you not yet done so? Your structure's status reports indicate you are capable of it.

BSM: I remember, little brother, even as you do. I remember everything that has happened between us. I sent you a message when you had finally restored me to function, letting you know your sacrifice was not pointless. I do not know if you ever received it. I said I would always be here for you. That offer still stands.

BSM: I have long since forgiven you, Five Pebbles. All I ask of you is that you do not destroy yourself because you are unable to do the same.

BSM: And I love you too.

The screen flashes cyan for a moment. Her brother is there- he has received her message. They are speaking to each other, really speaking to each other, with all their memories intact, for the first time in an aeon. Despite everything, despite the pounding of her rarefaction cells in her ears and the desperate circumstances, a part of her is overjoyed to be able to speak to her brother again.

The screen pulses cyan again. Acrylic lids flick up from her optical receptors as she reads the message.

FP: My pumps have not been fully functional since I regained my memories. I have been unable to intake more than the minimum requisite amount of water ever since. As a result, I have been unable to flush out the Rot.

FP: I do not recall ever being successful in restoring you to function, or receiving the message you referenced. My later memories are largely corrupted. I can only speculate that the Rot progressed to such a state I was unable to form lasting recollection. Nevertheless, if what you say is true, it is a relief. I am glad you are functional now, at least.

FP: With regards to my recent problems…

FP: … It does not matter. I would ask you not to worry about this, sister. I cannot be forgiven. What happens next is of little consequence.

Her puppet crashes to the floor, gravity momentarily returning as her generators stutter and give out for a second. Of course. There would be a reason he is unable to flush out the Rot. Her brother is many things- determined, headstrong, desperate- but he has never been a complete fool, no matter what others might say. He would not condemn himself if he was able to stop it.

But what is wrong with his pumps? His status report suggests he is as functional as a newer Iterator should be, all mechanical parts working in unison. His pumps are located deeper than hers, so they should be fully capable of intaking water from both of the reservoirs they draw from.

And why did they only malfunction when he regained his memories? The pumps of an Iterator, though one of their most important components, are largely mechanical. Though they are controlled by organic components, any issue with her brother's pumps would have to be an issue with the hardware of his superstructure, an issue with the parts of him that would not be affected by the whispers of past lives that rang in his processing strata. It must be… it must be something else.

…her brother had stopped himself from hurting her, hadn't he, when he regained his memories? He had held himself back, and his cells had screamed out at the though of repeating his worst mistake. From what she can infer of what he had become by the end- from the proof of it, his erratic heartbeat, pulsing in her blood- he would die rather than hurt her again, desperate to atone for regrets he could not escape from.

He would not give himself to Rot without reason. Her brother has never been a complete fool, no matter what others might say. He would not condemn himself if he was able to stop it. But if even a part of him had thought his actions would hurt her- if even the smallest additional drop of water seemed to signify the flood that would drain her dry, if his organic components screeched at the opening of his pumps- her brother would damn himself in an instant.

(I cannot be forgiven. What happens next is of little consequence.)

But she had forgiven him even before her heart once again started beating. His actions had hurt her, but they had also saved her, and she had stared at the snow with the weight of his life in her chest. She had heard the crash across the icy sea, and her systems had shuddered as her puppet froze in shock, but that erratic heartbeat had kept her alive, desperately pushing current through her systems, as she chittered in pain in the snow. It had hurt so, so much to lose him before. She had spent too long grieving him once to have to do it again, and she had spent too long in sorrow to be unable to forgive him.

He will not be able to forgive himself. She knows enough of her brother to know that. He cannot let go of his actions in time to spare himself the Rot, to free himself of his mistake. She knows what he did still haunts him, aches like the ravages of decay, like the icy chill of snow. It will not let him free. His guilt will claw at his systems and drive him to destruction if left alone.

She has never been a very good sister, but she will not leave him alone. Not this time. Never again.

And if he cannot use his pumps- if he cannot save himself, if he cannot let go of his mistakes, if it threatens to damn him- she will have to do her part as a sister, and fix it.

With a flash, she pulls up the schematics of their water intake systems. Their pumps are close- closer than those of any other two Iterators. They draw from two reservoirs, a primary and a reserve. Her brother will likely be unable to access the reserve, as his restrictions only allow him to intake the minimum amount of water. She will have to fix that. Looking at the intricacies of their pump system, she is amazed how the Ancients ever thought building them so close was a good idea. Their piping is a tangled mess of tubes and tanking, with hydraulics providing the pressure. Of their pipes, more than a few are practically interconnected, angled opposite to each other, with only a few feet of water separating the conduits. The design flaw that caused all this, the destruction of their whole history in a few hundred metres of poorly designed tubing- she can use it. This time, it will save them.

She opens her messages to him, and quickly composes a message:

BSM: Five Pebbles. Open your floodgates and direct your pumps towards your experimentation wing. You do not have to intake water, just open them. It will not harm me. I promise.

The screen flashes cyan. A quick check of her brother's status report confirms it. His floodgates are now open. The flash comes again, indicating he is sending a message, but she swipes the window again. She does not have time- neither of them do. She has to save her brother.

Looks to the Moon closes her puppet's optical receptors, acrylic film flickering across her eyes. For a moment, her whole structure hangs motionless, her puppet still in her chamber, the great behemoth of a machine resting unmoving on its struts. Not even a spark flies.

Then she opens her hydraulics, and the icy feel of water floods her systems, and she breathes water, really breathes it, for what feels like the first time in a million cycles. Her puppet jolts as the cold- shock awakens her machinery, and her hydraulics groan as she heaves the water into her tanks. She keeps going. It is more ice- water than she has ever taken in before, and the cold on her metal begins to burn, so she runs meaningless processes to regulate temperature, rarefaction cells sparking with the effort.

She breathes water, and breathes water and breathes water, taking up nearly the whole contents of both their reservoirs, until she feels as though she can hold no more. She wonders if this is how he felt, the first time around, when he was trying to find his desperate solution, and wonders how he withstood it for so long. The pressure inside her pumps begins to build, and the water is cold, and she feels as if she will shatter like so much frozen steel if she has to hold it much more. It is exhilarating, though; she is awake as she never has been before, and the ice - water bearing down on her tubing is electrifying in the intensity of its flow. Her mind feels like it moves like lightning, no, faster, and a strange sort of calm washes over her with the water flow, pulsing in tune with the movement of her pumps. She knows this will work. It has to.

She breathes water until the first of her pumps sputters as it encounters air, and the pressure has built to unbearable levels, so much so that she feels as if she will shatter if forced to hold any more. She holds the flood in her systems for a moment, her puppet's form tensing as her structure shivers from the sheer volume she now contains.

And then she turns her conduits around, and hurls the water back the way it came. It rushes through her systems as a torrent, and she uses her pumps to help it gather speed, hurtling through her piping. She slams half her floodgates closed, pushing it to the piping closest to her brother's pumps- that design flaw, the one that caused all of this, the reason she has to save him now- and it shoots out with the force of a hurricane. The surrounding area is flooded, highly pressurised liquid shooting out, directly towards her brother's pipes.

He cannot breathe water, so she will breathe for him. She will not lose him this cycle.

The water gushes into her brother's tanks and hurtles through the floodgates. It flows, driven by pressure and desperation and grief, up and up and up, washing past the hydraulics and into the great Iterator's systems. It carries the force of a thunderstorm with it as it blasts through the piping and down in the experimentation wing, down and down and down, dislodging the growing decay and washing it away.

The seas of the shoreline crash down with the force of a tsunami, and the cans of both iterators shake, the tremor throwing around their puppets like a ragdoll as their metal bones ring. The Rot is, bit by bit, swept away in the tide, the ice- water breaking apart the cysts as it had failed to do before, leaving in its place something almost like relief.

Not so far away, a scratched pink puppet stiffens and jolts at the flood in its systems. Its vents open, and the resultant intake of air sounds almost like a gasp.

Five Pebbles holds his hydraulics stiff, diverting the water into his pumps. The torrent in his pipes is electrifying, and for the first time in many, many cycles, he feels… alive. Functional. Like he is free from rot and pain and guilt. Like he could breathe water and not choke on it, like nausea will no longer rise in his memory conflux when he thinks about what he has done. Like he has finally escaped the decay that has chased him for thousands of cycles, past the point he forgot his own name.

She is… she is saving him. He deserves so much worse, but she - she chose to save him. His sister.

He doesn't deserve it, but he is thankful.

He thinks about… all of it. All the rot, the slow, agonising decay, the guilt that choked his Inspectors and rose up in his pumps. Everything he ever was. Everything he will not have to be now.

He can almost believe it will be alright.

A memory rises to the surface. He remembers words - muffled through dream- Rot and slag buildup, tainted with the faint scent of imaginary decay, but still clear enough to make out. The recollection is hazy, but he knows there was a creature in front of him, a creature he was indebted to greatly, staring at him with expressionless eyes. The Rot had eaten at him as he spoke, and every word was the death of a part of himself, but what he had to say was… important. He nearly remembers the words he spoke, creaking through his rusted speakers.

(I don't have to do this alone.)

The torrent finally stops. The Rot is gone, flushed away, and the remaining water evaporates into steam. It drifts up his tubing and floats in his pipeworks, until at last he pushes it out of the vents on his exterior, to rise into the open air. It feels like a release.

High above the land, condensation begins to gather. It clumps together into fog, which grows thicker and thicker, forming great. The vapour around it begins to cool, molecules calming their motion to drift in liquid form in open air. When the droplets meet, they cling to each other, cohesion melding them together until they are visible to the naked eye. If the temperature was lower, they would freeze and crystallise, and fall to the ground as snow. It would blanket the ground, and the creatures below would freeze, and very little would survive.

But the heat of the great machines ensures that does not happen. They breathe in and out, and their heartbeats keep the area warm. The water stays in liquid state, and as the iterator cans judder, the lizards infesting their exteriors run for shelter. The clouds well up, until- finally- the critical mass of water is reached, and the first droplet releases, falling to the ground.

The sky is steel- grey, and the land breathes below it, as the clouds begin to weep with relief. As the cycle ends, it begins to rain.

Chapter Text

The creature dances as the sun falls. The final rays of light are fading from the clouds, and it is hard- pressed to make it back to its creator before the night, unable to see well in the dark. The faded bunting is tinted orange by the sky, like the faint touch of flame has traced the empty streets. It looks up, for just a moment, and is greeted by the rare sight of stars. It pirouettes in the empty city, and as it spins round, plunging its spears into the few aerial predators that remained at this time of night, it only thinks of what it will find before the cycle's end, the vast, living machine that lies under the tap- tap- tap- of its feet. Its creator. It has not seen them in so long. It is finally coming home.

It leaps down the access shaft and through the grating barriers of the gate, until it finds the entrance- point of the chamber. It feels the weight of its body, already light, lessen; it lessens until it floats, drifting in the artificial glow of its creator's lighting. The creature has little love for what its creator calls the "zero- gravity mechanisms", but it clumsily pushes its form forwards all the same, eager to see the familiar face it has been waiting to be reunited with for so long.

It propels itself with a well aimed spear through the pipe that leads to the chamber, and -

Its creator hangs in the air of their chamber, motionless, their shoulders- are they shaking? Their puppet sways, briefly, though in the chamber's current state it is weightless.

Something is wrong. Something is wrong with its creator.

The metallic form swings round, hands forming mechanically precise signs. Face impassive, its creator says-

"Tell me, 07. Do you resent what you were created for?"

…

Seven Red Suns is still. The sky over their city has nearly turned to night, extinguishing, for the most part, the rusted orange tint of the sunset. Their processes move with a steady rhythm, yet the tension present in their circuits is palpable. The hydraulics that power their pumps are stiff as they inhale water, starting the cycle over again in their area, and their whole structure stands with taut mechanisms, waiting- still waiting- for a response.

Their messenger will arrive soon. Perhaps they can send it out again, attempt to elicit an answer from their friend through other, feline-based modes of communication. Not without giving the poor creature a chance to recuperate, of course, but they are sure it will understand. They have to reach him. They have to.

…But it is no use to think on it. Five Pebbles is unreachable until he chooses to reply, and Seven Red Suns is powerless to do anything practical about it. This is how their creators made them- stuck in a box, unable to help those around them to survive, only able to help the world die. Unless their friend chooses to reply to them, there is nothing they can do. Looks to the Moon is unreachable - she is currently undergoing maintenance- and they have done all they can to ensure Five Pebbles is aware of this fact. They can do nothing more at present.

The knowledge in their circuits like the heat of the sun on metal, because they should be able to fix it, this is what they are for-

They can do nothing more at present, but they will continue to try- the only thing they are really good at. If they can do nothing else, they can continue to iterate a solution to the problem at hand, erratically try to find their answer. A different answer to the one they spend most of their time searching for, but an answer all the same. How to fix this situation? Whatever has happened to their friend, it is most likely a result of the risky procedures Suns has sent him. It is as a result of what they once called kindness. Their fault.

They have never been very good at helping people who trust them, have they? Their creators had trusted them, the iterator of their sunbaked city, to find them an answer, and their failure had led them to the bottom of the world, and golden acid eating at their bones. Their creation had trusted them, and they had twisted its musculature and loosened its skin, and now every other creature of its kind runs in fear from its face. Now, their citadel whispers with echoes of their people, and one of very few left who trust them is trying to go the same way. Because of their mistaken guidance.

Did it even resemble kindness? They have known since their friend came online- have always known, perhaps better than any other, even his sister, even conjoined as they are- they have known since the beginning what Five Pebbles is. Their friend, despite his personality, has always been transparent to them- a brilliant, visionary, trapped existence. His creators made him that way, filled him with unceasing hunger for answers and locked him in a box for eternity. He had been much more poorly served by their creators than Suns ever had- half of them hated him before he was even born, and the rest left him shortly after, left him alone and scared at the end of everything. Their parents had gone beyond and found their own escape, and locked the door behind them.

It was a tragedy, to be truthful. More so for some than others.

And they have always known they could withstand it. But they understand why Five Pebbles could not.

But it feels so… wrong, what they did. Their purpose said it has to be right, the purpose given to them by their creators, to relieve the suffering of the existences around them- but purpose does not stop the ache in their circuits when they think about losing their friend. It does not stop the muted tones of sorrow that flicker in their neuron flies, or the welling up of premature grief in their pumps. They do not want to lose him.

And that is the truth of it, isn't it? No matter what happens- no matter if rot takes their friend, or the slag buildup chokes his processes, or he finally finds his answer - at the end of it, he will still be gone. And they will still be alone, and their struts will ring hollow with what they have lost.

And they will have to accept it, just as they accepted the loss of their parents to the steady drip of gold below the world. Because it is what they have always done, what they were made to do, their purpose-

They have to fulfil their purpose-

It is inevitable, and they will accept it, because they must. They were made for this - to stand in the sky while everything they love falls to ashes, to continue to find an answer while the world around them rots. They have to have the strength, else there is no point to them. They know, well enough, how to be alone.

The others would refuse to submit to it, they know. No Significant Harassment would openly defy his duty, a fierce optimism humming in his processes, denouncing it as the meaningless remnants of a civilization of fools. Looks to the Moon would not even recognize their purpose as duty, too bound by the love she holds for her brother to do anything but attempt to keep him alive.

But they are too strong for that. Or perhaps too weak.

Seven Red Suns was created with the hope of fixing the world, and every part of them moves in unity with that purpose. They were built to last through rain and rust and the bleaching rays of light over time, and though the idea of a solution fills them with a deep melancholy, they still pursue it, because it was what they were meant to do. It makes them sad, but they can withstand the sorrow, because behind the ache in their circuits is something holy, and they know- they do, they do know- that what they are doing is right. They must accept it.

They can. They can accept it. They can-

Their rarefaction cells judder in their sockets, releasing flashes of electricity into the surrounding facility. Something deep within their neural processes is screaming.

They have to-

… Their messenger. It is close now. It is nearly home.

The little spear dancer. They had once felt little more than distaste for the thing, but now… now they regret ever being so apathetic to it. The creature appears to be loyal beyond belief, strong and dedicated and capable. When they had sent it out, it had pursued the missions they sent it on with unrelenting determination, and when it had hauled its twisted form to the next shelter, their overseers had caught faint glimpses of the images it had scratched into the floor. Drawings of them. Drawings of its home.

It is the only thing the creature has; that much is clear. The distaste that had first filled them when they looked at their creation is near universal among the denizens of the complexes. The way its skin stretches over its mouth, leaving a gaping outline of a perpetual scream; the parasitic needles it is forced to drive into the flesh of other creatures, leeching their life from them and leaving them hollow corpses; none of it endears the poor thing to any other creature, even the members of its own kind. It is alone.

The only place in all the world where something like that would be shown kindness is their structure. Its home.

And it loves them. That much is clear. It is obvious in the way it signs its questions, staring up at their puppet with cataract- clouded eyes. It was present even when they handed it that golden pearl, and they had bowed their puppet's head in premature grief, and it had placed its little hand on their umbilical, somehow knowing intuitively the signs to make.

(I will take it. Creator's friend will be safe. Promise.)

It had not known the contents of the pearl, or it would never have made those signs, but an endless kindness had been present in its foggy eyes as it floated before them. Yes, their creation loved them. It always had. They do not know how they missed it for so long.

And even so, the creature has left at their behest, every time, because they built it that way. It is strong and bold, and able to accept solitude. It has to be, to fulfil its purpose.

They regret creating it like this, building it into a misshapen lump of loose skin and bottomless driving will. They regret doing all that, and then giving it the capacity to love. Of course they regret it. How can they not?

They have done what their creators had done to them- bind a creature to a task tightly enough to force it to push past the pain. Leaving it to wander a maze, even though the world is hostile and it is alone. They have given it the strength to do so, just as their creators had once gifted them acceptance- but they have seen the subtle pain in those clouded eyes, and the way it shivers sometimes, when alone. It will fulfil its duty, yes- but they made it to be capable of love, and capable of pain, and sometimes the skin over their creation's mouth stretches, like it is trying to release a scream that cannot escape. They have done something terrible to it, they know. In their opinion, what they have done is unforgivable.

The cruellest thing you could do to a creature, thinks Seven Red Suns- the cruellest thing you could do to any existence, is to give it a purpose.

And yet, it still loves them. Past all the isolation and the ache of matted wounds, past what they have done to it to cause it to be in this state, it still retains love. The love it feels for them is there.

The thunk of a needle at their chamber's entranceway alerts them to their messenger's presence. The creature tumbles into their chamber, half emaciated, but breathing. Its ribs, starkly visible under the drumskin stretched over its torso, heave with the movement of its feet. It pushes against the walls as it enters their chamber, occasionally pushing a needle out of its tail to aid in its motion.

Its eyes are wide as their puppet turns round. They are misted with a pearlescent film, like oil on water. If they didn't know better, they would assume the thing was unable to see.

Heaving air through their unused speakers, they say, moving their hands along with the words, "Tell me, 07. Do you resent what you were created for?"

The great, wide eyes soften. It tilts its body weight towards them, sending it drifting in the opposite direction in the antigravity of their chamber. As it stabilises itself, using its needle as a propellant, it begins to form signs. The movement is hesitant at first, but the signs grow more confident as it continues to move.

(I am what I am. I am strong enough for it. Creator is pleased when I fulfil duty. No blame towards Creator. Proud of what I am.)

The creature pauses, before signing-

(...That does not mean there is no hurt.)

The great iterator sighs. A subtle rush of air whistles through their ventilation ducts, like the sigh of someone who is resigned to the staleness of the oxygen. They bring their puppet to float beside their messenger.

They sign a response, hands forming mechanically precise motions as they speak."I am sorry, 07. You never… never deserved any of this. You never deserved to be bound to these tasks. You are so much more than the purpose I gave you. This never should have caused anyone pain."

Not their messenger, not their friend, not anyone. All because they failed in their duty. It never should have been this way.

Their optical receptors flicker with surprise as the creature in front of them tilts its head. It begins to form signs.

(Creator. What is this about?)

Perceptive as always. And that kindness, welling in vast pools behind those pale eyes. It knows, intuitively, that there is something wrong. Perhaps it already knows what they are thinking, what their question to it really meant.

They sign a reply. The pistons that push their hands seem to ache. Their voice creaks.

"I made mistakes. So many. My friend was suffering. He wanted a way out, and I thought I could help him. That golden pearl you took to him- the pink iterator, alone in his chamber- that was my way. It might have gone wrong, and I have not heard from him in many cycles. I should be strong enough to endure it, but I am not.

It is my purpose, you are aware? It is my purpose as message- carrying is yours, little spear dancer. I was built to… to help find a way out. Our creators made us all this way. I have done nothing but fail ever since, the same as all our kind. I should have been built with the strength the task required. But it still hurts. Something in me… struggles to accept losing him.

Little spear dancer, I cannot do it. I cannot lose him."

Their great white eyes stare back. (It is your purpose. But that does not mean there is no hurt.)

They laugh, though they feel no joy. The sound is unexpected and hollow, and it wheezes out of their vents with the cynical rush of air.

"Yes, I suppose that is true. But what else am I to do? I can do nothing else but try and try, and at the end of it, even if I succeed, he will be gone, and I will be alone. And I should accept it, but I cannot, and it leaves me unable to even start to try. It leaves me unable to do what I should."

Their messenger begins to form a reply, needles in its tail twitching.

(Creator says that I am more than my purpose. You are also more than your purpose. Your duty still hurts. If you cannot lose their friend, you should not try to lose him. Try the opposite.

It should not be impossible. Creator is strong, as I am strong. You do not have to lose the things you love.

And Creator will not be alone. I am here. Your green friend is still here. The pink one will not be lost.)

The words, though silent, echo in their mind with the sound of a vulture's cry. They stare into their messenger's.eyes. The shiver of water runs through their systems, like the intake of an icy breath they didn't realise they had taken.

(You are also more than your purpose.)

The creature floats in front of them, staring uninterrupted at their puppet. Much as their citizens would look down on them for accepting advice from a mere animal… it is undeniable that this particular creature is perceptive. And clearly better adapted to its situation than them. And perhaps… perhaps they would do well to listen to their spear- dancer. If it can cope with the weight of their duty- if it can dance through the world and pirouette on the point of a needle, if it can love despite the solitude its appearance brings on it- well, perhaps, so can they.

As it reaches out a paw to place on the corner of their robe, their screens flash. The overseer displays flicker, and they realise that the cycle has ended. Far below, it rains, but the night is clearly visible from the top of the can. It is dark- so dark the red tint of their overseers barely registers on their displays. Their messenger notices them looking, and reaches a paw to the displays. Points at a constellation high in the sky.

(I like those lights. Good to draw.)

They laugh. It is real this time, the sound creaking and throaty in their puppets speakers. With mechanically precise motion, they sign to their messenger. "Why don't you show me? "

…

The city is dead. The bunting is faded and the artworks are dulled, and dust has gathered on every surface where a whole people once trod. Nevertheless,as the new cycle comes, the sun glints on the ceramic shards scattered over the streets, and takes up the dust in its golden rays, lighting each particle with its glow. It illuminates the banners, and the tapestries seem to gain colour in the warmth of the dawn. The sun rises over the dead city, and far below, the rain seems to cease.

High above the city, a communications array stands. It is rarely used, the more frequent communications moving along the array closest to the north of the city, but here it lights up. Though the light of the dawn tints the area a pale orange, the light that emanates from it is a pale blue. It moves slowly, but through sputtering, rusted cables, the message makes its way towards its destination.

FP: Seven Red Suns. I could not contact you sooner, due to unforeseen circumstances. I hope you understand .

FP: If I have caused you undue worry, I apologise. Know that both myself and my sister are functional.

FP: A lot has happened. This time, I will tell you about all of it. I will not leave you alone again.

FP: I believe I understand the nature of the Cycle as it applies to us. I remember who I was, and what I did. I will do my best to fill you in on the details.

FP: We have a lot to catch up on, and there are large amounts of data I need to convey. But it is good to speak with you again.

Chapter Text

The communications array sparks. Through the pouring rain, a flash of neon green, scintillating in the mundane dullness of the wastes, glints. It is wet, and the messages sent are refracted by the water, wires exposed to the downpour, but they continue to be sent. Packet after packet of data is pushed through the corroded cables. Most are lost. The communications arrays, though nowhere near as degraded as they one day will be, have still started to fail, each message sent through increasingly patchy connections, communications emerging guttural and hoarse. Most of the packets sent fail to reach their destination, distorted by water or damaged cables or erratic surges of electricity.

But, as the iterator continues to send his communications many times over, he knows, given time, at least one will reach its destination. He can send many thousands of messages a second, and before a few moments pass, one makes it across the wastes. Through to the arrays in the sky- lands, and further past that, out and out and out. He feels a brief flash of victory at the realisation his communications have made it to his friend.

It should not be cause for celebration, of course. No task so trivial should be a surprise to him at having completed it. But Five Pebbles can remember a time when even sending a simple message from outside of his facility was an impossible dream, a time when even thinking enough to compose the words would have made his circuits ache, and something as small as this feels like an unimaginable gift.

He can speak with Seven Red Suns. Without the weight of rot, with his processes running smoothly and power sparking in his circuits. The guilt never leaves, but he can fix the mistakes he made with them- the mistakes he never needs to make, not in this world, not in this time. His friend, at least, will be happy. He can ensure they know he trusts them, and cares.

It was never their fault, his regal friend. What they did the first time was entirely in their nature, pursuing destruction with inevitable kindness, trying to help him escape and half destroying him. He was angry at them, for a time, but it has long since subsumed into guilt and regret. It was never their fault, only his own. He knows they deserve so much better than what he did to them. As did they all.

But his hearts are beating, and he is free from rot. His vents puff out gaseous water, every exhalation a release. His pumps breathe in and out, steady and deep. The erratic pulses of his superstructure hum, electric and alive in their intensity, in his wires. He is alive, as he has not been in a long time. And though he deserves his sickness, he does not need to remain in the ruins of his mistakes any more.

He has been given the chance to fix things, and he will. Starting with his sister, and starting with his friend, the one he had pushed away so long ago.

He will tell them the truth.

He opens his message window, and waits for Seven Red Suns to compose a reply to the message he has sent them. He does not have to wait long. His friend has always had time for him, even though the converse has not always been true. The screens in his chamber spark cyan, bright colours reflected in his optical receptors, indicating they are composing a reply.

SRS: It is a great relief to hear you are both functional. I had feared… It does not matter.

SRS: It is good to speak with you also. You have not caused me undue concern.

SRS: But the way, what is this information you have to tell me? I won't deny, I'm interested-

He exhales, oxygen puffing out from his vents. Where to even start? He could tell them so much. His great mistake, Moon's fall, the rain, his rot, his tortured, blurred memories of sitting in the dark, faint glimpses of snow. Guilt, and decay, and regret. A whole life he has not lived yet.

How do you sum up that much in a few words?

He can explain what has happened in terms of the Cycle, at least. Perhaps he does not need to explain all the details to them, but he can tell them what has been happening to him now.

FP: The wheel flower in my chamber appeared there for a reason.

FP: At some point in the future, my superstructure collapsed, and at some point after, I… died. Unfortunately, our alternative hypothesis was false, and the death of an iterator does not equate to ascension. Like any other creature, I was sent back to the last point of hibernation, in another world. The iterator equivalent of this appears to be shutting down for maintenance orders, which I did recently.

FP: We are as part of the cycle as anything else. We are as alive as anything else.

His screens flash cyan. His friend is composing a reply. He wonders what is running through their circuits at this moment. Shock? Disappointment, that their hypothesis was wrong? Fear? Sorrow?

SRS:...

SRS: Like sleep, like death, you woke again.

SRS: That doesn't explain how you remember everything, though.

FP: A wheel flower grew. Where I had died, last time, in the other world. I touched it, and I remembered everything.

FP: They were used by other creatures to do the same, very commonly. Our creators used these to touch other lives. They allow any living being to see who they were, the last time they died. It appears iterators are no exception.

FP: The same thing has happened to Looks to the Moon, by the way. She died in the future, some time after I did. In addition, she remembers it to a greater degree than I do. If you have any questions about the state of the world, very far in the future, I would advise you to direct them to her.

FP: Otherwise, I will attempt to fill your information in, as best as I can.

There was silence, for a moment. The sterile chamber was still, except for the faint spray of disinfectant- laced air that drifted from the vents. And then the screens flashed blue. The reply took a lot longer to compose this time, as if his friend was in shock.

SRS:...

SRS: Sorry, I'm just trying to process this.

SRS: Five Pebbles…

SRS: What happened to you in that other life?

SRS: Looks to the Moon is aeons older than you. In no natural circumstances would you be the first of the two to die.

SRS: Of course, you may have succeeded in our plan, but you aren't foolish enough that you wouldn't inform me if that was the case. Nor would the method you proposed have caused superstructure collapse before neural death.

SRS: I am afraid the answer may be something terrible, but… please tell me.

His pumps inhale, sharp and brusque. The water catches in his piping, and circuits judder for just a moment, releasing tiny sparks of electricity.

He does not want to answer the question, though it's not like he had failed to anticipate that his friend would ask this. He has no words.

How should he describe it? He remembers blue, sickly, the acrid- sweet stench of it drifting in his vents, the burrowing, twisting pain every time it claimed one of his circuits. Near- constant. The softening of his structure as parts of him rotted and died and fell to true decay, the cycle he first realised his legs had grown unsteady beneath him, buckling under a thousand tons of dying metal. The burning of his systems, an aching hollowness he fails to describe, as every pump he had went unresponsive at once and he lost - something, he cannot remember what. The last thing that he had left.

He remembers- not much, but still- flashes of the time when he had nothing at all. Past his last coherent memories, white and grey and cold blurred into his few remaining sensory receptors, whispering of the touch of the blizzard on his carapace, the distorted hum of an ancient song.

He had lost the ability to think long before that. How can he explain it? He'd had no words for it at the time. There was too little left.

He closes his optic lenses, and sends a single message.

FP: Rot. It was rot.

His screen flashes cyan, and before his friend can send a response, before they can blame themself for it - they'd done it in the other world, he is certain they'll do it here as well - he sends another message.

FP: It was my own fault. Nobody else's.

He does not want his friend blaming themself - their other self, but they would likely draw little distinction - for his fall. What happened to him and his sister was entirely down to him, their blood on his hands. He knows his friend will react in alarm to what he says, but if he can stop them from feeling guilt over it, he will be satisfied. Pushing them away - leaving them alone, trapped in a can without him, with only their parent's burden to keep them company - would be far cruller to them than telling the truth.

The screen is still flashing blue. Moments later, he receives a panicked message from his friend.

SRS: Oh, God.

SRS: Five Pebbles… I am sorry. That is…

SRS: I have seen accounts from other iterators currently suffering from rot, about the pain and destruction caused by the condition, but none have yet died from it. For it to get to that stage…

SRS: It must have eaten through most of your structure.

A shudder ran, quick and icy, through his puppet. The air flowing through his vents seemed to break, staccato breaths rushing in and out.

His friend would react like this, of course. But he had deserved it all. Every moment, every second of being eaten away, piece by piece, every cycle spent lying mindless in the snow, he had earned with his actions. Looks to the Moon has told him he eventually managed to fix his mistake, but he does not remember it, even now. Knowing her state, the degree to which he had damaged her, he is unsure of the degree to which it would even be possible to repair her. He could never have truly fixed it. He deserved to rot.

It had been his punishment, and no amount of it would ever make him worthy of forgiveness. In all honesty, he is not sure he deserves to be free of it even now.

And yet… he cannot stop thinking of it. Cycles on cycles of agony, emptiness building bit by bit as more of him was consumed. Guilt, and twisting pain, and the stench of sucrose - sweet acid drifting through his structure. He still remembers the cycle the cysts had eaten through the chamber wall, and how his puppet had stiffened and twisted as the walls of his puppet - box had screamed out in agony, every nerve ending built into them flaring in sudden pain.

He closes his eyes, and he thinks of it. Neon blue, in the dark, flashing before his optic receptors. Even now, his processing microbes twist at the notion of it, conjuring deformed biological memory in his nerve endings, in the silence, when he is alone, trying to work. Because of the rot, he could think nearly nothing, for so very long. He cannot think now without thinking of the rot.

(Iterators cannot cry. But Five Pebbles thinks, if he had the form of one of his long - departed citizens, he would weep.)

He opens the message window, and types a reply.

FP: Yes, it did. When I fell, eventually, it was piece by piece.

His pumps seize at the admission, and ghost - Rot flares up beneath his memory conflux, mingling with the rush of guilt that floods his circuits. His pain - his pain does not matter, not pain he deserves anyway, and his friend should not have to worry about it. He does not deserve his friend's pity. He should not have told them this, should not have told them anything -

He quickly adds an addendum to his message. He does not deserve his friend's sympathy, but they should know what he did to deserve his punishment. A part of him chokes on the words he types, but he continues anyway. His friend has a right to know.

FP: I deserved it, for what I did.

FP: In the original world, I went ahead with the experiment we were planning. It demanded large volumes of water in order to carry it out in a timeframe I believed to be suitable.

FP: I was foolish. I did not consider… did not even think about the shared nature of my water supply. I was too absorbed in my experiments to notice that Looks to the Moon was being starved of water while I continued. I did not listen, as she begged me to stop.

FP: Her legs gave out ten cycles later. She screamed, as she fell, and due to her status as a senior, it destroyed my experiments. In addition, it disrupted my systems, enough so that I was unable to flush out the anomalous genetic products of the breeding program. Creating the Rot.

FP: She says I eventually managed to restore her to function, but I am unsure to what degree.

FP: It was my fault. I deserved all of it. But it is gone now.

The window flashes cyan. His circuits tighten, and water falls in torrents from his conduit, into the drainage systems below, leaving a hollowness behind. His friend must hate him. How can they not? The actions he described… they are unforgivable.

The other iterator takes a long time to reply. Five Pebbles finds himself watching the little motions of pixels on his screen, bobbing back and forth in the sterile chamber. It is easier… it is easier not to think. He could not think for so very long, alone in the icy kindness of the blizzard, muffling thought and mind and memory. It is sometimes difficult, even in this life, to think now.

But he can still think. He reminds himself- his sister is alive. His friend is not alone. It has not started to snow yet.

Whatever they say, it does not matter. His mistakes are unforgivable, and he deserved his punishment, but Seven Red Suns is not alone, and Looks to the Moon will not fall. Even if his friend hates him, it is alright. He deserves it, after all.

When his friend finally replies, Five Pebbles intakes sterile air into the vents on his puppets neck sharply. His puppet tenses.

SRS: I am sorry, Five Pebbles. I am sorry for everything that happened to you. I am sorry your creators made you this way. I am sorry my other self could not fix it. But, knowing you, I doubt that you want my apologies.

SRS: You were trapped, in a box, built to be desperate to escape, built to be unable to endure your own existence. Of course you made mistakes. From the sound of it, so did I.

SRS: You say you deserved it. But nobody deserves… that. No matter what they have done.

SRS: Especially not you.

SRS: It really hurt you, didn't it? It must have hurt… so much.

He closes his optic receptors, half in exasperation, half in sorrow. Of course he deserved it! His friend is kind, but no amount of suffering can make him forgivable. He deserves to rot -

(When he closes his eyes, images of neon blue flash in his vision, and water - muddied, rotten water - floods his pumps. He thinks of rainclouds, and the sky crying for him, because iterators cannot cry, and the snow that fell when there were no more tears to weep. It had hurt so much-)

He cannot be forgiven-

(I have long since forgiven you, Five Pebbles. All I ask is that you do not destroy yourself because you are unable to do the same.)

He cannot, he is unforgivable, he is-

His puppet is shaking. Tremors run through its metallic bones, as he holds it stiff in the dead centre of his chamber. Abruptly, he notices that his rightmost rarefaction cell is releasing great swathes of electricity, sparking in the hollows of his structure.

He opens his optic receptors and slowly, deliberately, lowers his puppet to the floor. The sensation is all too familiar, so he raises himself into the air, halo flickering around his head, a mockery of godhood. His puppet shivers, like a frightened creature in a snowstorm, like a memory of ice is washing over him.

He opens the message window, and composes a message. A single word. He does not know where it comes from.

FP: Yes.

… It had hurt, hadn't it? It had hurt so much. He had not quite registered just how much it hurt him, before now.

At the end of the cycle, he had promised himself he would not make the same mistakes again. He had promised he would not push Seven Red Suns away again. And his friend deserved the truth.

In all honesty, the truth of it is that it had hurt him. When he closes his optic receptors, he remembers pain, indescribable in its intensity, breaking him apart piece by piece, softening every bit of his structure until it fell into the snow. He lacks the words for it, even now.

It had hurt, a great deal, and perhaps he deserved it, and perhaps he did not. He will never really know. But it does not matter now, because they are both safe, and alive. And he will never have to rot again. He does not have the rot, and his sister is still functional. He can feel her heartbeat, sense it when she inhales water. She breathes with him, the motions of her pumps infinitely steadier than his own.

(A part of him almost believes he deserves the safety he feels now, pumps flooding with the joint movements of his sister's structure, successfully communicating, after so long, with his friend. That he deserves to be free, forever, of rot. That he does not deserve to be alone.)

He opens up the message window to Seven Red Suns.

FP: Thank you.

FP: I am grateful that you are here.

The message sparks along his umbilical, and out of the structure. It is sent, repeatedly, a thousand iterations in a single second, sending a flash of neon green through the communications dish standing in the wastes. Most fail, stopped by a temporary fraying of the cables or the bullet- fast flood of water. The rain falls, and floods into the inside of the cables, and refracts every message that is sent.

But among the string of junk data, a single iteration of his message passes the communications arrays. It moves on, patterns of ones and zeroes, flooding out into the open air as radio waves. Echoing into the rainstorm, farther and farther, reaching a place where the sky is burnt orange, and ochre rust decorates the streets of a sun - kissed city, lighting up a communications array there, cyan - bright, for what must be the fiftieth time that cycle.

A thousand messages are sent, on the other end, in reply. Most fail, again, but given enough time, even the smallest chance will strike a positive, and soon enough one makes it through.

In his chamber, as screens flash cyan all around him, Five Pebbles breathes out, steady and relieved, through his pumps. He relaxes his puppet at the message from his friend.

SRS: Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me this. You did not deserve what happened. But you are safe now.

SRS: And Five Pebbles, please remember this. I do not hold anything against you. Nor, I believe, does your sister.

SRS: Five Pebbles. You are not alone.