V.

--stepped carefully between branches, making sure not to scratch myself or step on anything. I held on to the trees as I stepped below branches and avoided thorns, navigating cautiously through the natural environment. M-Bot followed closely behind and was much more blunt, simply pushing things out of its way, stepping on flowers and breaking off branches. Thorns grazed harmlessly off its metal skin. It seemed to be brooding, as it often did. We had been walking in silence for what had to have been ten minutes, so I finally opened my mouth and asked bluntly,

"Why do you seem so miserable, M-Bot?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Whenever we talk, you seem gloomy, and half the time you don't talk at all. And from everything I can remember, you've always been like this."

"So I guess it's just my personality, then."

"Sure, if you didn't seem to be feeling it the way you did. You're always negative. That night when we were all around the campfire outside that bridge town, we said we were happy you were here, and you just deflected with a joke."

"Well, it's not like you were being serious. Why would you want me around anyways? If I am always negative."

"Because we care about you."

"Sefgh and Matt do. You're more detached. Don't get mad, though. I like that about you."

"I'm not detached. I guess I don't show it quite so obviously, I stand back a little more, I don't talk as much, but I still care about other people, you know."

"Sure, in the way you care about having a good day and having other people to be around. It's not like other people care about each other."

"Bullshit. And now instead of talking about you, we're talking about me. You see how you've brought it all the way back around to avoid talking about yourself?"

"Because I don't like myself."

"I didn't say that."

We tried to keep a steady pace as we moved through the brush, but it took a great amount of concentration. The ground was uneven, and we were moving slightly downhill now. I ducked and weaved carefully through and around branches and plants, and M-Bot moved methodically behind me, carefully keeping proper calibration. As I slid between two trees, I noticed a bug with orange coloring crawling on the bark, a few inches above my hand. It moved slowly, and was the brightest thing I'd seen in days. We kept going.

"I think it's gone. The shadow. I hate to be negative, but I don't think we're going to find it."

"Probably. It could've gone in another direction, too, and maybe one of the other groups found it. Wish we could still talk to each other."

"Because you don't want to be alone talking with me?"

"No. I actually like this. I like being alone with you."

"Oh." It didn't have much else to say to that.

"I'm surprised Matt went off alone. He doesn't really strike me as the 'solo hunter' type, but what do I know?"

"I bet Sefgh and F.P. are pissing their pants right now. Two biggest scaredycats grouped up together."

"Hah."

Before I even heard the sound, the corner of my eye caught it. I whipped around as I heard the rustle in the leaves, and found myself staring at a shape in the distance. I focused a little more, pointing my rifle. It was just a deer. It stared back at me, frozen, and I noticed she had no horns. A phrase echoed around in my head from somewhere I still can't remember while writing this: "The Continuing Adventures of Bungalow Bill". She was beautiful. My weight shifted slightly, and she ran off.

"You know, I feel it too. The detachment." M-Bot said.

"Yeah?"

"I could've killed that deer right then, and I wouldn't have felt anything. Maybe a bit annoyed that the gunshot sound would tip off the shadow, but it's not here anyways. I wouldn't have felt anything watching it die. I didn't feel much of anything hunting those animals last week."

"You don't care at all that it's alive?"

"Maybe. But I don't feel it."

"So why don't you kill me, or Sefgh, or Matt?"

"Because I like being around you. I would feel even worse if I was alone. Wouldn't you?"

"Sure."

"I like you too, Maine. You don't talk all the time. You understand me more than the others. Definitely more than Sefgh. It pisses me off how she tries to control me, like I'm just some child. When she tells me what I can and can't do, or acts like she knows what I'm thinking, or drags me everywhere with her."

"Yeah, I know. It sucks when someone acts like they own you, right?"

"Exactly. You know, I know a lot of stuff from the information stored in my memory. I'm not just some two year old - but anyways. There's a piece of technology you can put in a robot like me, something that was included in the production line. It's a chip that lets you override their autonomy and take control over them."

"You don't have one of those, do you?"

"I don't know. That's the thing: it's designed to be undetectable until it's activated. The only way you could tell, realistically, is if you got broken open, and you could either see in your own guts or you could see the way your wires spilled out, and it'd let you calculate the topography of your innards."

It pointed its rifle towards its chest.

"Maybe right now I should-"

I firmly put my hand on its rifle, and it stopped.

"No. You're not going to do that because we don't have the supplies to fix you up again, especially not in the middle of the woods. We've been walking for close to an hour and if you do that here you might not be able to get back."

"I won't be dead. You could take my brain out of my body and put it in a new one later."

"You're being obtuse. There is no later. We can't guarantee that there will be a later. We're about a month's travel away from home, and the further we travel the more danger we'll be in."

I looked into M-Bot's eyes.

"Danger that we might need you to get out of, one day."

"So I'm a body for the pile?"

"You're useful. You're worth keeping around."

"For practical reasons."

"Yes, and for sentimental reasons. You realize that the main reason Sefgh acts like that around you is because she really cares about you, right?"

"So I should be ok with it?"

"No, but you shouldn't risk your life just to spite her or test out a theory, either. We can do that later, alright? I don't want some shitty override chip to be sitting in you any more than you do, but we have to focus."

"I guess."

We walked in silence for several more minutes. Some of the conversations we'd been having were stressful, but when we weren't talking it wasn't quite so bad. It was completely silent here minus the small rustles of our movement, and accepting that the shadow probably wouldn't turn up, it was nice just to get some fresh air and stretch out my legs. This was, of course, until M-Bot tapped me on the shoulder and pointed towards the sky. A tower of smoke rose in the distance, dark gray to the point of nearly black, gashing through the muted greens and yellows of the trees and fading harshly into the sky's bland gray blanket.

"You think it started a forest fire?" M-Bot said, already beginning to rush towards it.

I didn't follow at first. The sight was giving me flashbacks.

I saw it in front of me like I'd never left. I was lost deep in the woods in the middle of January, 4012. All the trees around me were dead and skeletal, gray and brown, the grass limp and decayed. I was fourteen years old and completely alone. There wasn't anyone else around for miles. The sky was a pale blue and when the sun passed between clouds it looked like it was behind a mile of glass. The world was silent and still. I was climbing to the top of the hill when I noticed it. A plume of smoke, rising softly.

I blinked and saw the real world again. My eyes darted to M-Bot, a few feet ahead of me now, and then my mind thought of it pointing the rifle at its chest, and thought of a cold gun pointed to my temple again, and then I blinked a few more times and rushed towards it and tried to forget what I was thinking about.

"So slow."

"Whatever."

I had to try sometimes not to get completely lost in my memories. It was all or nothing: either I didn't remember anything and I just floated by in a contextless sea of the present, or I became fully entangled in my own mind and its endlessly, intricately interlocking mechanisms, lost in a web of past and present and future. Everything is something is something else - the branches of a tree remind me of a fractal image, spiralling into itself smaller and smaller forever as it reaches pathetically into the sky. It'll die. It'll always die. The leaves will fall off and the tree will die, it'll never get enough sun as it needs, it'll never get what it wants. So many moments go flashing by it gives me nausea. The smoke plume is still rising off in the distance, flowing into the low-hanging clouds and fog like a river into the sea. The smoke plume is still rising in the past, coming from a fire ravenous enough to burn the whole forest, to kill me. It's all gone. Everything I loved and knew is gone. Time to start over, a fresh start, a new person, free of context. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, still following behind M-Bot. Back to amnesia. Much better. Who needs that shit anyways, is what I always thought.

It was just too bad about the animals.

Reaching the source of the smoke was a miserable twenty minutes. The walk had now taken an overtone of anxiety, and we had our rifles at the ready. M-Bot tried to make small talk at first, but after a minute or two of no response - I was too busy keeping utter blankness in my brain to say anything back or even process what was being said - it fell silent. It was all silent, and in this new atmosphere it didn't feel so much like peace as like death, just waiting to strike at any moment. If it wasn't the shadow, or a forest fire, it would be a wild animal lunging for our throats. There must be predators here, after all, if the deer population hadn't grown to a size to completely swarm the woods. Maybe they saw our rifles and knew better than to step out from the shadows, or maybe the world just didn't make much sense. Our communicators only buzzed out static when they were turned on; we were alone the whole way.

When we reached the source of the smoke, it wasn't from a wildfire. This was first obvious from a distance of quite a few feet away, when it became faintly visible through the cracks in branches that there was a small clearing up ahead with a large campfire burning away in the center, bright and red and flickering and shimmering. We slowed to a crawl, inching our way hunched on our knees towards the light, walking so slowly that we didn't make a sound. It was about ten feet away that I stopped behind a tree, sneaking my head to peek besides it, that I saw a figure by the campfire. He was small from that distance, but even still had a certain atmosphere to him. The ground around him, all across the clearing, was charred and black from the fire, and shadows were cast with unusual harshness. The colors were all burning red and bright orange and glowing violet and cold, solid black. This man had on long, utterly plain purple robes, extending from his neck to just above the ground, the shade cool and the design ungarnished. The edges were tattered, with tears and holes near the bottom. He carried a long sheathed sword strapped to his back. His hands were at his sides, and he wore black gloves. His hair was long, black, and messy in the way that suggested he hadn't cleaned or combed it in quite a long time. Despite this, he himself did not look messy; he was very much in control of his appearance, it clearly seemed. He just didn't care to keep up a nice appearance, to comb his hair, to wear more elaborate clothing, to dust the dirt and soot off of him. There was one detail about him that was more disturbing than anything else, and I stared, transfixed. He wore a mask that fully covered his face. There were no eyeholes, even. Like his robes, it had no design, completely blank; unlike his robes, it was perfectly clean. It looked as though it were made of steel, and as I stared, a pale gray reflection stared back. He turned towards me and my eyes widened as a memory hit me with blazing fury and utter volume, a strike of lightning.

This was the man who had killed the demon above the Town of the Church of Holy Light two years ago, the event which had kickstarted this entire chain reaction.

I blinked.

When I opened my eyes, he was gone.

M-Bot set off our flare as we sat there, dazed. After a pause, two more flares from the distance came up. None of us had found the shadow. We started our long treks back to our vehicle and prepared for another few weeks of dreadful buildup before we would finally reach our targets.

INTERSTITIAL: "The Moon's dark side never faces the Earth. It's frozen cold and you'll never see it. The Moon is gray and covered in scars. The sky is dark and oppressive and the stars all blinked out long ago. My life is meaningless. Nothing means anything anymore. I am miles away from the nearest person. It's an endless sea out there and I don't know how to swim. It meant something once, but now it's all gone. It got smaller and smaller and finally blinked out and nobody noticed. You'll never see me again."