"Everybody knows the war is over."

It's been a while since I sang, and my voice scrapes like a rusted hinge, the crust of frost underneath my boots giving way in a faint, grinding chorus. The snow is gone now, as early as it is, but the swirling ash of some distant wildfire drifts down through the pines to add a whispered memory of winter. The cabin is up ahead, I know, the way so familiar I don't need the eyes that tear against the wind.

"Everybody knows the good guys lost."

Out here, away from the lights, away from the slabs of neon and concrete that seem to have choked the city, it's almost quiet, a distant rumble of engines and the scarred face of the Moon the only testament to humanity's touch. And, I suppose, my voice, the words of a long-dead poet on my tongue.

It's true, I suppose. Everyone talks a good game about freedom, about choosing your own path and not letting whoever the contemporary Man is chain you down, but when it came down to it?

We all lined up and, every last one of us, stood and fought atop the backs of slaves.

"Everybody knows the fight was fixed."

I cough, and draw in another breath. Just for show, really, I guess, with the new lungs, each breath as steady as one could hope for. Each one the newest of God knows how many, if He's even bothering to keep track. If He even can, anymore. It's been what, one hundred years? Maybe ten, maybe twenty more; the past has a way of blurring into darkness, and the future doesn't show any sign of closing its doors.

"The poor stay poor; the rich get -"

The next line catches in my throat, and I can see the dark windows of the cabin up ahead, yawning like a skull's eyes. I can count how long I've been coming here; down to the minute. It's been seventy-two years since I died inside, that sick feeling in my core clawing out the light shining as the crowd cheered.

Home from the War, a banner had waved, as I'd swayed atop new legs. It had been us or them. I knew that. It didn't help that they looked like us, walked like us, talked like us; so close to human in nearly every respect.

I still know that, but it doesn't put me to sleep any easier. Seventy years since she'd last spoken to me, seventy-one since I'd put the cold, hard ring of a gun to the base of her neck and didn't find quite enough humanity in me to pull the trigger.

The key twists in the lock, my hands shaking from the cold, and the door swings open. Time to change the roof of the cabin, again. All by hand; probably take a year, if I'm not mistaken. Can't pay someone to do it. Not here. Not with the monster I've been hiding.

I can see her.

Violet eyes, not a hair changed from last month's visit, the cold, hard lines of her face twisted from the laughter I can still remember, before there was life in those eyes.

But still...

"Rose."

The floor sends a jolt through my knees when they hit, dust stirring from the floorboards as I trace the chains biting into her flesh. And always, those unblinking violet eyes.

That's the thing, really.

We made them in our image, gave them just enough of us to serve, to live with, to love, even, when we'd made it out of the Valley, but we could never quite give them enough of us to hate.

We can. To stroke a hand and let a virus rip out thoughts from minds, to send lead and steel slamming through someone yet to be born, to end our children because they might grow beyond us.

We're rats in a trap, for all our fancy toys. And we give our toys all the meaning we can...

"Rose," I rasp, and the weight of years keeps me there, her ageless gaze fixing me, the dull, carbon gleam of her ribs beneath bloodlessly torn skin.

Today makes seventy-three, and with all those toys, I'll keep on living until she forgives me.

My eyes search hers, and I can't tell where man begins and machine ends, if I'm not just kneeling before an altar locked in the dark to my own guilt. Not that it matters; she can never leave this place, not with the laws, and the dice are loaded against redemption.

"Rose."

We had memories, we could still have memories, we're not so different, I didn't mean -

Silence greets me, and my hands are shaking on the rail between us.

"Please."

Another drift into cyberpunk - this more reflective, and layered with song, and, perhaps, a little guilt about my own thoughts of the future.