The Edge of Yesterday
Everyone is the hero in the prison of their own mind.
The words rattled around his head as he fought to keep the chill of the desert night out, pulling his leather duster and hood closer, tighter. They could keep the chill out. But not the words that continued to eat at him. Slate grey eyes turned back to glance from his hood over the dunes, checking to see if he was followed by more than the words that were spoken to him.
You sought to be free, to no longer be a slave. You are a slave to your hatred.
Bandaged features twisted into a snarl of contempt, the purple flesh of a hand reaching up to draw the drinking straw from inside the duster. The water was stale and almost empty. It did little to stop the burning in his throat.
You were used. Your hatred allowed this. They used you as a slave once more.
That purple hand tightened into a fist as he walked, eyes boring intense holes into the sand in front of his path. He was trying to clear his head, the familiar rage that boiled inside clouding his mind. He needed to focus. One foot in front of the other. His Kodiak gear behind him filled the night air with light as it burned. There was nowhere to go but forward.
Were you a slave to your masters? Are you not a slave to your own hatred of them?
“Humans,” the GREL nearly spat from his hood as he trundled on through the sand. Of course, it would take four of them to bring him down. A GREL. Even in their native machines. Yet he had learned how to pilot one cycles ago…adapted, as humans do. They may have destroyed his gear. They may have killed his team. But he made them pay. The humans. They paid in full.
Why do you hate them? Do they reflect your masters or your rage? Are you so different than them?
The GREL paused just a moment in his steps, staring up at the calm desert sky. There was no breeze. Just the dead still of the night and the sounds of secondary explosions behind him. No doubt the ammo from his gear and kills cooking off as they burned. It burned almost as fiercely as the words that haunted him now…
That monk.
“Damn you, Mayen. Damn you to whatever hell your humans invented for you.” He hated Mayen and his words because they were true. He had been used. Worse, he had been used by the same humans who had made him, forged him…
Enslaved
That pacifist monk. That insufferable, self-righteous ingrate. He had been used, his hatred being the weakness that his enemies needed to manipulate him. The CEF had used him and his hatred of humans to facilitate their operations. To move an antimatter bomb across the desert. The bomb which destroyed Peace River. He had a small part in this. But it was a part, nonetheless. It was an exploitation. Of him.
And how they hunted him. How the Paxton forces hounded him like a dog through the wastes. Yesterday it was Northern Guard attempting to hunt him and his GRELs down. Today, it was Paxton. Who would it be tomorrow?
You are always living at the edge of yesterday, wearing your hatred like comfortable armor. You never consider tomorrow. Until you look to the possible future, Proust, you will never win.
“– Colonel, come in. Buran 2-1, Buran 1-1, respond…” Proust’s comm-bead filled with static, shaking him from his thoughts.
“What,” the GREL growled out a single word as a statement rather than a question, reflecting his foul mood.
“Colonel Proust! There’s a team en route for retrieval and salvage. ETA 12 minutes. We’re picking up more Protectorate forces roughly 30 minutes out. South by Southwest.” The chirpy tones of the Kassandra GREL on the other end had far less static as Proust adjusted his bead.
He knew this one… Verona, her chosen name.
“Very good. Use this signal.” Proust took out the comm-bead, pressing the emergency button and tossing it. He was in no mood to speak further. There were so few of his forces left now.
Hunted. Hounded. Exterminated.
His brows creased as he thought about Verona, the Kassandra class comms officer. She would be hunted down too. As would his men this day. As were his team cycles ago. But always, he remained. Always, Proust survived. Escaped. It was always those under him who suffered… even those few humans in his ranks. None of them deserved this nor deserved to suffer because his former masters manipulated him.
He was now starting to realize… Peace River would never stop hunting him. Not after their precious model city was destroyed. The CEF had used him to this end… used him. It was bad enough that GRELs were created to be the slaves of Earth. But to use him? Manipulate him? They would sink to the darkest depths to get what they wanted. His people would suffer. And the Protectorate would hunt him.
“Megalomaniac. Murderer. Terrorist…” The GREL sneered as he sat down in the Badlands sands with a groan, overlooking the wrecks scattered the way he had come. The words tasted like ash, “That’s what they call me.”
Would a megalomaniac mourn? Proust wondered in his own thoughts. He didn’t know the answer. He did know he felt the losses, a weariness that ate at him over time. He unslung his pack and sat it heavily beside him. Inside, the extracted ONNet of his Kodiak sat secure. He patted the pack and the ONNet affectionately.
“Mayen can’t understand,” he spoke quietly to his one constant companion, the ONNet that had remained with him since he had first struck out on his own. “Freedom isn’t won with words. It’s by action. Violence.”
He could hear distant engines but couldn’t see past the fires of the burnt-out vehicles. Not in this dark desert.
“Maybe Mayen, Sebastopol and the others are right…” Proust turned his head to look at the pack next to him, as if speaking to the ONNet within, “We can’t do this alone. We’re too few now… and so many of us have made peace with the humans.” He sighed to himself. A purple hand reached up to wipe sand and carbon from his face. “We might need the humans after all.”
The engines were getting closer.
“But I know one thing that is not a maybe.” Proust’s eyes narrowed, staring with renewed determination in the direction of the approaching vehicles.
“We will be free.”
