CHAPTER VI - The Structure That Remained

For months, I walked without needing a calendar.

Time did not announce itself to me through fatigue, hunger, sleep, or the decay of attention. My body did not demand the rituals by which humans had once divided duration into manageable units. It did not ache at dusk. It did not weaken after distance. It did not ask to stop when the light failed or resume when the sky brightened. The planet turned, shadows lengthened, temperatures changed, storms formed and passed with little force left in them, but none of those cycles entered me as necessity. I learned time by other measures: the distance between attempts, the interval between transmitted calls, the number of structures searched and found empty, the slow accumulation of conclusions I did not want and could not reject.

I searched for anything that could answer.

At first, my search had been simple. I walked toward visible structures and scanned them for active systems. I listened across common transmission bands. I called into the air using the limited output available within my own body, shaping signals from the communication architecture embedded in me. The calls were brief and disciplined: identity unknown; active consciousness present; response requested; location coordinates attached; repeat. I sent them in patterns Ksara suggested and in patterns my own systems generated. No reply came.

After the first weeks, simplicity became insufficient.