On the way to the cafeteria to grab dinner, we bumped into Bastion.

"What happened to you?" Moon asked, eyeing him up and down as he joined us on our way.

He looked as if he had just stepped out of a sim rig after an intense training session. The look on his face spoke of exhaustion and he walked with an odd gait as if affected by land sickness. But he wasn't wearing training gear, just his regular uniform in the characteristic Talos colors – dark grey and green where my own Keres uniforms were black and red, and Moon's were white and blue.

Bastion looked back and forth between the two of us and for a moment seemed to reflect on what to answer.

"I'm just tired. And hungry. The princess stole my lunch," he said and pointed at me accusingly.

"What? You offered it to me!" I corrected him.

"And then I asked what you'd give me for it, and when you had nothing to offer in return you took it anyway. That qualifies as stealing in my book," he explained.

"Consider it... forceful repossession," I suggested with a shrug.

"Repossession?" Bastion exclaimed. He put a hand to his forehead in a theatrical gesture. "It's a crime, I say. The princess has lost touch with her people. Perhaps it's time to stage a coup d'état!"

I had given up on arguing about his preferred nickname for me a long time ago. I couldn't even remember how and why it had started - there really wasn't anything remotely princess-y about me. But today, I felt like playing along with his little game on a whim.

"Big words for a peon," I said drily and gave him my best impression of a haughty look.

I briefly considered suggesting he have cake instead, but the joke would probably be lost on him.

"Ham and cheese, or veggie?" Moon asked the truly relevant question.

"Ham and cheese," Bastion and I replied in unison.

"Well then, like I always say, no use crying over fake meat," Moon grinned.

"Since when are you an authority on meat?" Bastion asked, "You don't even eat it."

"That's why I qualify as the only objective authority here," she asserted. "Besides, it's disgusting. Good riddance, man."

She shuddered at the thought, reminding me just how deep seated her dislike for the stuff was that we called "meat". Confined within the walls of our city, traditional agriculture and keeping of livestock had never been an economic solution to feed the people. These days, all our nutritional protein came from plant and microbial sources, cultivated in bioreactors or hydroponic gardens. That stuff was then further processed to mimic the original flavor, texture and appearance of their namesakes, be it ham or chicken breast. The potential of that technology was sheer endless, and the inhabitants of Pharos certainly didn't have to miss any flavors in their cuisine, but the raw materials were always the same, simple proteins. And some people, in particular ex vivo born ones, could not tolerate the taste of certain materials. Due to some persistent mutations of their taste receptors, certain foods would taste like ash, bile, or dish soap to them. Moon was such a case. Although I personally suspected that her choice to cut anything out of her diet that didn't taste sweet wasn't exclusively rooted in genetics.

"But fake meat doesn't make it a fake theft," Bastion insisted and pointed at me again. "That'd be fake logic."

"Why don't you try to report me to the campus Enforcers. I bet they want to hear all about these serious, sandwich related crimes."

"Yeah, if they weren't so busy with the investigation of that prototype incident - that you were involved in too, by the way - I'd totally do that," Bastion nodded decidedly.

We had crossed the campus center square halfway already, and I was just about to say something back, when a strange noise caused me to fall silent.

A hum filled the air, as if somewhere, something enormous and ominous was being charged up with electricity. The low and deep noise flooded my ears with a loud rumbling, reverberated within my chest, and caused the hair on my arms and the back of my neck to stand up straight.

Nausea overcame me, and I stopped in my tracks.

"What the hell is that?"

"What?" Moon asked.

"Don't you hear it?"

"Hear what?" Bastion looked at me confused.

"That humming sound!" It kept on getting louder, and I almost had to shout to hear myself. I wondered how on earth he could not hear it.

A terrifying thought occurred to me, and as I looked up at the sky, I was expecting a giant alien mothership to have manifested out of nowhere. Maybe today was the day it would all end. Maybe the large scale Anshar invasion that had been in the making at the outer reaches of the solar system had finally reached earth.

But there was nothing but the faint glow of the first stars dotting the darkening evening sky. The noise continued to grow louder still, and now several people around us seemed to notice it too. They stopped and looked around in confusion.

"I think I hear it now. But where is it coming from?" Moon asked.

In fact, it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. As if the ground below our feet was emanating it. I was tempted to cover my ears, but it seemed to be within me, too.

And then - I hadn't thought it possible, but suddenly the hum was drowned out by something even louder: the sound of birds.

From the far side of the campus, where the park ended and a patch of wild forest began, a giant flock of black birds rose to the sky, innumerable voices chattering, twittering and screeching in distress. They formed a living black cloud, moving in unison, but in a tumbling, disoriented motion that made them look like a single, enormous creature flailing against the twilight sky.

"Oh no. If they go any higher-" In shock, Moon covered her mouth with her hands as we watched the flock ascend.

They will get caught in the mesh, I completed her dismayed notion in my thoughts.

From down here, it was hard to guess how high up it was, especially since it was inactive. But it seemed like the birds, although disoriented, sensed it somehow and avoided a collision. The undulating black cloud began to drop again, turning over, and then made toward the city center.

The hum that had filled the air was gone, and their cawing dwindled into the distance above the skyline of downtown Pharos. Around us, most people overcame the shock of their surprise and the campus square came alive again.

"What in the name of the Builders was that about?" Bastion asked, scratching his head.

"No idea," Moon mumbled, looking after the flock. "I've never seen so many animals at once. I never even would have thought there were so many birds living in that forest at all. How weird."

I didn't comment. I was still dizzy from the strange noise, and my chest felt like it was locked in an iron corset that made it very hard to breathe. There was something horribly wrong with that sound.

Images were floating before my mind's eye, evoked by the low hum that still seemed to rattle my bones even now. I saw a vision of a dark and bottomless chasm that called to me, beckoning me to come closer and take a look what may lie beneath. The vision twisted and turned into the Daidala exoskeleton, its backside panel all open like a set of wings spread out. The glowing wires on the inside lay exposed like a network of blue blood veins, glowing with a steady pulse. Their light dimmed, and as my sight was drawn closer, the lines turned into a network of metal beams, leading through dark water in a maze-like pattern.

I gasped and shook my head violently to clear it of the irritating images in my thoughts.

"Sky? Are you okay? You look very pale," Moon noticed.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I reassured them, barely hearing my own voice over the persistent ringing in my ears.

As we walked on, I fell behind a bit, and realized that my nose had started bleeding once again.

~ ~ ~

After dinner, I went back to the infirmary to return the monitoring bracelet. I was surprised to find the same nurse still on duty - or probably again. I thought he must have been extremely exhausted, but he wore a smile on his face while he was dutifully tending to a student – a first year Keres cadet, judging from his uniform - who had a nasty looking graze wound on his arm. As I entered, the boy looked up at me and blushed profusely.

"I can wait outside if you prefer..." I offered to the nurse and his patient.

"No need" the nurse said. He finished dressing the wound with impressively swift motions.

"You're good to go. Come back tomorrow for an anti-scarring treatment, and after that you'll be like new," he said to the boy.

As the kid passed by me on the way out, he looked up at me with a strange, wide-eyed expression on his face – as if I had just manifested from thin air. After the door had shut behind him, the nurse gestured me to sit on the examination bed.

"He just told me about your feats on the training grounds yesterday in great detail. You made quite an impression on him," the nurse explained and cast me a friendly smile that caused two dimples to appear on his cheeks.

So that was why the boy had been looking at me like that. Now I blushed myself.

"Oh. That." I said in a flat voice. "Well, I'm just here to return this."

I stretched out my hand, and presented the bracelet. He removed the thin silver band it from my wrist with a deft motion. His hands weren't cold, quite the contrary, but when his fingers brushed against my skin, I felt a strange tingling sensation for a moment that caused me to shiver.

Rubbing my wrist, I looked up and met his gaze. He didn't look tired at all, even after working the whole day. In fact, he looked wide awake, and his bright blue-eyed gaze was focused on me like a laser beam. I hadn't noticed it before, but he really had incredibly long lashes. And from up close, I now also noticed other details about him that I hadn't realized last night or this morning, like the freckles on the bridge of his nose. His pale skin was smooth, but there was just a hint of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. I wondered how old he was - it really was impossible to tell.

"I saw a sudden spike in your heart rate today in the early afternoon, and later on, your blood pressure dropped twice. Can you tell me what happened?" His expression changed from one of scrutiny to concern.

"I was in a new simulation training regime this afternoon. It was quite exciting."

"And after that?"

I opened my mouth to speak, but that very instant, a strange feeling crept up in my gut. I snapped my jaw shut again, and bit my lip.

It's no big deal, I told myself. It was just a nosebleed. People get them all the time. If something was really wrong, he'd have seen it through the monitoring bracelet. 

"I don't know. I didn't eat much today. But I just had dinner an hour ago, so..." I said and shrugged. "I suppose I'm fine now."

He squinted at me, as if he was waiting for me to add something to my tale. I stared back into his blue eyes without budging.

"By the way. Did you manage to find out what happened to my files?"

A furrow appeared on his brow. "I am still trying to locate the missing data. I am sorry about that."

He seemed more dismayed about it than I was myself. But at least I had successfully distracted him from interrogating me further.

"Ah, well. I bet it's just a glitch or something," I said and smiled at him.

His face lightened up a little, and I felt myself relax.

"Okay... well then, I suppose I can officially release you. But if anything out of the ordinary happens, please come back here, will you?"

I nodded, wondering what could possibly be stranger than the nosebleeds I had just on a whim opted not to tell him about.

"Of course. Thank you." I turned to leave, but before I stepped out of the door I turned around one last time. "By the way... what's your name?"

I didn't know what urged me to ask him that. Perhaps the fact that he was so nice. It was his job to be nice, but he had been here since last night and I would have fully understood if he had reacted annoyed when I just barged in on him and his patient. And to top it all off, I had just flat out lied to him about my health, and I had a vague feeling that he was aware of that. But instead of being cross with me, or bothering me with any more questions or examinations, he just looked at me with this gentle expression - that turned absolutely blank now at my words.

"I have no designated name. Please rephrase your question"

I froze in the doorway. That could not be right.

I looked at the man closely one more time. He was just standing there now, his arms hanging down limply.He didn't blink. And his eyes, staring straight at me, right through me, were devoid of any of the emotions that I had thought to see in them before.

Had I still worn the tracking bracelet, it would show my heart rate spike as the shock of the realization hit me with full force. I felt so silly. I wanted to think that it was impossible – that my intuition wouldn't have failed me like that. But it would certainly explain why he had seemed to be on duty continuously for two days.

"What is your identification?" I asked.

My voice was calm and composed, but that didn't really matter. He was designed to recognize this command, his programming would compel him to answer my question, even if I just muttered it under my breath. It was one of the secondary laws.

"This is unit Eta-RN-31562 operating under Asclepios 5.3" he replied.

The sudden monotony in his voice filled me with a strange sadness.

"What is your purpose?"

It was a redundant question, because there really wasn't so much as a shred of doubt left, no matter how much I wished that he was just some guy playing a prank on me. But it was very obvious now. The only thing about him that moved were his lips. The only person in this room breathing was me. His eyes were still of the same bright blue as before, but they seemed dull and empty now. When I looked at him now, I couldn't believe that I had not realized it sooner.

"I am a nurse. I am assigned to provide medical advice, treat injuries, and care for the overall physical and mental well-being of the patients of this infirmary."

I stared at him for another moment. I felt like an absolute idiot for being so easily deceived. But I knew now why instinctively, I hadn't trusted him with the whole truth. I had probably sensed that something about him wasn't quite right.

"Very well. Thank you. Resume," I commanded with a sigh and turned around to leave.

Behind me, the Artificial nurse came back to life, and would continue to operate as if nothing had happened.