Random snippets of imagery flit past your mind as you tumble through your dream. The events of the last few billion years filter through your brain. Things you had forgotten long ago come back to you. You remember time spent on worlds long since destroyed, time spent with civilizations that fell after standing for a thousand millennia, empires that once stretched across galaxies crumbling into dust. All the people you have known, so many people of every kind and in every shape and form that sapient life can take, they fly past your eyes. Many of them members of species forgotten by everyone save you. Histories of a million worlds play out before your eyes. Memories of your own race, the name of which even you forgot long ago, those who made you what you are but couldn’t do anything to save themselves.
What your creators did to you was no cheap trick of cybernetics or genetic engineering. You are not the same as so many other so-called immortals who have come and gone from this existence. Every single time that you have died, and there have been many times, you come back. Hundreds of thousands of years may have passed in your absence, or maybe only a few minutes. You may appear on a planet full of life and civilization, or you may reemerge onto a deserted rock. Each time the memories of the past grow dimmer, harder to recall with each rebirth. This is your fate, to watch the universe live and die. You are the Wanderer.
You wake slowly and calmly. It feels like it has been a long time since you last drew breath. You find yourself laying on a flat reddish rock. A lone star blazes high in the sky, and you can feel its heat beating down on you as you lay under a stunningly blue sky. You pull yourself into a sitting position and examine your immediate surroundings. The area looks like an arid scrubland, small clumps of hardy looking plants dot the red soil in the surrounding hills and occasional breezes kick up plumes of dust. A short ways down the hill you see a small pond, and you walk to it. Kneeling down to splash yourself with the cool water, you stop and stare at your reflection.
What do you see?
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