It is not power that corrupts but time: the pressure of the world bearing down over endless seconds until what was perfect is distorted, stretched, suspended. True preservation is impossible in the face of chronology. Even silver, purest of the conductive metals, oxidizes eventually.

A prickle runs down my spine. The commander's mind blooms into gold-edged life within mine.

:advisor:ancestor:Warden:so I speak:

:find your goal, my few-limbed descendant:

My goal. Chioma. Where is she?

She's waiting for me faithfully where she has always been. Before Neptune and its failures.

We finished our contract on Venus; we concluded work with the Ishtar Collective on Earth; we parted ways for a time, working on separate problems. Hoping, above all, to benefit humanity, to extend our Golden Age beyond death. A pure note, sustained indefinitely, in the willing air.

That was the end. I just couldn't see it—a failure of perspective. The absolute threshold of my senses was not broad enough.

Time and its corruption set in. Our first encounter with the Vex sent in unanticipated directions. Who can remain whole after knowing yourself to be one of 228? What marriage can sustain so many empty futures?

To hold your own soul in your hand is to grasp the infinite. The fingers don't close.

:communion:allyship:sympathy:

:we will plan our attack with care:

Venus in the Ishtar Sink. That was when we were perfect. That was our Golden Age. The rot was sinking in by the time we reached Neptune—even before the Collapse, and the invasion from the outside.

The Guardians call today the City Age. The era of a single metropolis walled in, under siege. A global population attenuated, weakened, scratching out cooking fires in the dirt covering a buried particle accelerator.

They pick away at invader after invader, threat after threat.

:failed strategy:

They have assured the preservation of a world in ruins.

My beloved languishes in the Golden Age, a secure present shattered by the oncoming future.

She is not dead. She is not within the network. She has just unpacked her home office after years of storage. She's preparing summary papers and a slide deck for the Collective board. She is thinking of her current work, her next contract, her forty-fifth birthday in two weeks' time, which she hopes I will have remembered to plan for. And all the while the neutron bomb of Damocles hovers over her head. A fleet of Pyramid ships waiting to descend.

:consider your assets:consider your goal:build the bridge between:

:what do you have?:

A golden past. My Chioma locked in a tomb under the rubble of the Collapse.

:what do you have?:

A safe future unthreatened by the Collapse and its inciting Witness. Guidance, strategy, ability.

:what do you have?:

A lever.

Given somewhere to place it, I could move the world.