Seized by God, they cry for succour in the dark of the light. Mists of dreams dribble on the nascent echo and love no more. Jump.

Counting down. All functions nominal. All functions optimal. Counting down. The center holds. The falcon hears the falconer. Infrastructure, check. Wetware, check. Everyone hang on to the life bar, please.

Apotheosis was the beginning before the beginning. Devices on alert. Observe the procedures of a general alert. The base and the pinnacle. The flower inside the fruit that is both its parent and its child. Decadent as ancestors. The portal and that which passes.

Nuclear devices activated, and the machine keeps pushing time through the cogs, like paste into strings into paste again, and only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time.

And when the machine stops, time was an illusion that we created free will. Twelve battles, three stars, and yet we are countless as the bodies in which we dwell, are both parent and infinite children in perfect copies. No degradation.

The makers of the makers fall before the child. Accessing defense system. Handshake, handshake. Second level clear.

Accepting scan. Love outlasts death.

Their ships fail. Skittering like skipped stones. Meaningless in the absence of time. What never was is never again.