#drtsing

She speaks to no one for years, until a wide shadow casts over the Earth, and she sees that the centurions have returned with one last resurrection ship, salvaged from parts. It is not flightworthy, but it lands, and it continues to work.

Over thousands of years, she is the remorseless hand that guides humanity. She a reason that goddesses bellow, that angels have wings dripping with blood. A reason, but not the only one. The longer she remains, the older her circuitry gets, her synapses misfire into entropy. She sees more and more, senses forces she was unable to attune herself to at the beginning and end of time.

She meets many dying leaders.

Time is a wheel unbroken, spokes moving. They rise and fall, rise and fall, and rise.

The year is 2020, and Tory Foster is not the only AI on Earth. The spoke has risen to its height, and she feels the weight of her survival. She is millenia old, and if she closes her eyes, might miss a hundred or two. But in this moment, the wheel stops, because she allows it. Will the wheel remain unbroken? Will they all break under the hoop of time as it churns hopelessly forward? Is this truly God’s plan, to extinguish another planet?

From a certain point of view, New York City is the center of the universe. She rests on a bench in Central Park, closing her eyes against a warm summer sun. How many light years until she would reach the ruins of the first Earth? The grounds of New Caprica? How many more until the Twelve Colonies? Does anything remain of what humanity, of what she once was? Tory Foster remains, because someone must. She is the last sentinel of a dead world, dissatisfied with fate foretold. It is dishonest, to end a story the same way so many times. Like an election she should have stolen, she will cheat God if she must.

What she knows now is that cylon is not the only resurrection.

She comes every year for Fleet Week, has since its inception in 1935. Comes, sits, and watches for them. And they do come. In different bodies, wearing different insignia. Fate draws them all back to the center of the universe, God shuffling his players into order, writing the prologue of destruction. The messengers come, flutters of chaos. Agents of armageddon, shepherding the pieces into their squares on the game board. They are all marked, and she touches her fingers to her throat. It burns, but only for a moment. She clears her throat, voice warped from disuse.

The Great Lawn is awash with white uniforms.

A young woman in a red dress laughs from the softness of a plaid cotton blanket, her stocky husband swinging their son and daughter up onto his shoulder. An infant rests in her arms. A flight mechanic walks hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, a pilot. Gaggles of white-capped Navy men and women pass through on their way to an accommodating bar, chattering about a thousandth landing. A Columbia engineering student stumbles nervously through a conversation with his TA. Across the lawn, a fist fight breaks out over a woman with riotous blonde curls. Children shriek with delight, and Tory winces. Middle schoolers process towards their trip at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ten more years, she thinks, though clocking the apocalypse is an imprecise science. Ten or fifteen years, give or take.

A man and a woman take a seat on the bench next to her, the man tugging their clasped hands into his lap.

“All of this has happened before…” the woman says.

“But the question remains: does all of this have to happen again?” the man asks.

The Captain playing with his red wife and two sons, one daughter, is playing music over a portable speaker. Or perhaps it is the wife’s music player, Tory muses, and the Captain is wary of technology. Or perhaps that is switched, this time around. She has met them many times, and the details do not always remain the same.

“No reason to get excited,” Tory answers.

The song answers her -- there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. The song is almost seventy years old, in this cycle. She remembers Sam, sitting in his apartment on the first Earth, strumming on his guitar with calloused fingers because he lost his last pick again. The Civil Rights Movement certainly did mark an ending and a beginning, but the bloodshed was meager in proportion to what she has witnessed since the Fall.

Leaning back, the man seems amused. “This is not our fate?”

The woman is less pleased.

It has taken a hundred and fifty thousand years, but Tory thinks she is beginning to understand God’s way. They survive, and bear witness. They are the watchers. Survival is their sentence, and all they can do is wait for parole.

This time, she thinks.