Alec drifted in time and space. The baron truly was a terrifying adversary of like mind. This was absolute torture for Alec. His mind launched back half a century, a baron with a particularly deviant mind. He had left him in a vat with Althyrian Clench-worms. They kept their prey alive for years, consuming them through equally deviant means. It had been justice incarnate. A child's and a woman's faces flashed before Alec's eyes, and he brushed them away. The suspended silence sent him another ghost from his past.

  A young financier, too young to know what kind of people he was running scams on. Even the most brutal gangster has a mother and a grandmother. That financier gazes on from mechanical eyes in a preserved skull. He looked on as his organs were sold to pay the woman's retirement fund back. Alec assumed the young oppressor of the aged still looked on in that baron's collection room.

  The child, the mother. His wife. His child.

  He wiped the visions again and tried to sing in his head. "My boots been marching since." His brain could not handle the extra exertion in reserve mode. He was forced to let it float. Back three hundred years, Quip, the wild beast. Alec thought of him as a friend, but Alec was here, and Quip was free. Although suspended here, Alec truly knew that if Quip had slowed, it would be slowly being taken apart as he floated. Preacher. Something was wild with him, like Quip. Broken. Too bad, Alec had thought a man might have listened to the impending destruction of baronhood citizens. At the very least, it pitted him against the baron on the grounds of faith. No. Preacher was something… different.

  The child laughed at the mother. Alec, walking through a door, sees that the windows are lit orange and blue. The look of terror in the child's face as he beheld his father's visage.

  He wiped the thought away again. His brain was giving in to the trails that had been wandered least in the last two millennia. One thousand years ago was the height of Alec's career. Earth was different then; they didn't call it prime, and there were no barons. The United Federation ruled the entirety of planet Earth, including the underwater settlements by then. There was no war, but Alec knew best not to underestimate human beings' ability for greed and corruption. He was employed by the unified leader themselves to dispense his brand only upon the knowing and ruling members of government.

  Alec was a perfect deterrent, yet an honourable one. All knew the stakes. All knew his face. If one strayed, it was knowingly, and Alec felt a freedom and righteousness in his tasks. He enjoyed those years the most; they fell during the cataclysm and the great resource wars. Alec yet remained, dispensing his justice.

  The child running to his mother. Alec is imploring them to run, but knowing it was to no avail.

  He knew his brain was not going to let this go. Alec may be suspended in this suffocating echo chamber, but his brain had a place it was going, and Alec was too tired to fight it any longer. It jumped back nearly two thousand years. Alec was a mathematician, a simple cog in a large machine of a government research facility. His genetic code was a match with five others in the group, and as a government worker, Alec was given no choice. He was given a call, just one, and he tried to make her understand that if there was a choice, Alec would have made it for them each and every time. Immortality had no lure to him; a lifetime of love and duty did. The child and mother wept on the phone. Alec resigned himself to immortality. With all the time in the world, he could fix this in the future.

  He was wrong. He watched the first two go through a process involving a newly discovered element from a passing asteroid. They called it by digits and numbers back then; now it is known as Aamaranth. The two passed in horrible convulsions. Alec was part of the next two. He held the other's hand as they shook until their final breath, cursing Alec as his body took to the serum. Alec's recovery was miraculously quick, and he used it to his advantage. One night, the base he was held in was placed on high alert, and all military personnel were posted at the president's orders.

  Alec ran faster than the cameras watching him could see. He took vials of the precious life-giving element with him, the last time Alec had tasted pure Aamaranth. With those, he could live beyond the age of his wife and choose to pass away with her. He ran to their home, every street alarm blaring. He ran to the door. The air raid siren screamed into the air. His laughing boy looked up at the door and began running to his mother. Alecs' visage was scarred and bloody, where they had carved man to machine.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Even his wife took a moment to recognize her lost husband. She wanted to slap him, she wanted to embrace him, but in that moment, fire lit the sky. Alec had them to the basement in a moment with the aid of Aamaranth and saved them from becoming the ashen concrete ghosts of the apocalypse. After that day, no one dared touch the nuclear elements of the earth. Alec lived untouched by the elements as his wife and child succumbed to the radiating sickness that took those closest to the cities. When they passed, Alec spent enough time to bring their bodies close to him in the basement bunker they occupied. He ignited the last of his Aamaranth and remembered nothing until he was awoken hundreds of years later. Born yet again through a person of science to be the world's harbinger of revenge.

  Alec listened to his brain; he was convinced he was to serve as judge, jury and executor of revenge upon himself in that moment. His mind drove the conspiracy home that this trial he was facing now was indeed of the stars, sent to have him taste the medicine he so willingly dolled out. When facing it as a human in his mind, no longer the creature of legend, it brought the scale to that of the heart. The baronhood had none, and neither had Alec in service to them. The eyes of his wife and child did not beg him to join them as he had tried. He knew her. They begged him to live and bring the life they envisioned to the people oppressed within this world.

  The realization brought Alec back to the current moment. Something was moving in the viewport that had disturbed his final descent into mania. He tried to focus as he heard the door hiss open. Standing there, bright green-eyed, was Preacher. The automaton was dressed in the long jacket of a man with the skirts and heels of a bar singer. Red frills dressed the edges, where it clung to the automaton's hips, and it matched the giant red feather in its folded, flopping hat.

  "As far as any technology in this place is concerned, I don't exist, and this is not happening." Its green eyes were flashing with processing power. This thing was hacking the mansion. "I'm afraid, darling, we don't have much time, though. As tough…. Tough… tough….” The thing began to glitch as Alec hung there, and the eyes flashed blue. "We are tough, we will slay the heretics and interlopers, crush their skulls and put to rest the abominations that stand before the lord of oil!" The religious fervour in its voice was incredible. Alec felt he was staring at an entirely different personality. This was confirmed for him as the automaton looked down and saw its split fashion and looked aghast. It struck its head hard a few times, and the lights turned green yet again.

  "He's always looking for key terms in the code to slip through. If I start talking about being all well…. Grrrr." The automaton mimed a fighting man, but it looked like stage choreography. "Then that one comes out. Anyway, back to us, we've not got much time." Preacher walked over to the controls and dialled down Alec's suspension. He fell to a heap, exhausted, in reserve mode to move.

  “Unless… your… made of the same… stuff I am… You may be dragging… my heavy ass out. Or at leas… to madam… zelsims…” Alec's words were all strained as he tried his best to make his words clear.

  The automaton flourished on one of his healed knee-high boots and spun in a circle as it passed between the four apocalypse crew. They stood staring straight ahead as if Alec and the door were still in place. Being on a connected neurolink had its drawbacks, it would appear.

  Preacher continued its dance, tapping the noses of each guard and holding out a hand like a magician finishing a trick with a smile on its face. In its white metallic two front fingers, Alec saw the vial of Aamaranth with feathers adorning it. The one the dream singer had tried to give to him.

  "A mutual friend says hello." Preacher smiled even wider on its sim flesh face, it became inhuman and unnerving. "Now, let's get going before we have to slug our way out of here." He clicked the vial into Alec's arm and threw the other on the floor. Alec breathed in power. It wasn't the pure Aamaranth, but it was better than most of his contracts provided. There was something raw to this one that gave him a confident edge. He felt as if he was directly connected to this planet's heartbeat and had to move with it.

  "That's the spirit! Let's move before we have a fight on our hands." The eyes flickered blue again, and the accent switched from the singsong playfulness to an intense religious fervour.

  "If there is a fight on our hands, you need me! Release my fury upon the heathens, let me sever limb and skull in the name of the blessed oil god". The hand struck the automaton's head once again. On time, three times, the eyes returned to green. "That sardine's back in the can! Now, let's move, friend of my friends. We have others waiting for us on this side and on the other… Tusong and a strange friend await us!"

  A strange friend? As they ran through the baron's mansion out a clearly planned path, Alec wondered what old friend he would discover at the end of this road. As it stood, the humanoid in frilled attire and a wayfarer's jacket and hat was an odd enough addition to where the stars had brought him. What could possibly come next?