“Unfortunately, this one seems to be a replica from around the early twenty-first millennium.” Trazyed, staring up at a ving remake of Migelo’s David.

  “I suspected as much,” I said. “Humans bombed themselves bato the bronze age during the Age of Teology.”

  “Such is the nature of those straio the present.”

  “I suppose it is,” I said with a shrug. I wasn’t going to tell the space skeleton that living in the past wasn’t the best either. Especially si resulted in him being quite possibly the most agreeable Ne in the gaxy. “I’m surprised it took them so long though. And even more surprised that they survived it at all.”

  “How so?” he asked, suddenly curious, and the statue fotten. “Many civilisations st many millennia before some cataclysm or another puts ao them.”

  “Humans could have wiped themselves out by the end of the 20th tury,” I shrugged. “The fact they somehow only advanced and rose up until the tweh millennium is a miracle greater than whatever the Emperor call down.”

  Trazyn hummed in agreement. “It is unfortunate how many civilisations disappear, destroyed by their very own as, throughout the gaxy on a regur basis.”

  “Do you have exhibits of some of those civilisations?” I asked curiously. “Those who just appeared and disappeared from the gaxy, unknown to the gaxy at rge?”

  “There are some,” he nodded. “Though I admit few were deemed worth the effort of immortalising in my Galleries.”

  On one hand, beiive with what history should be remembered rubbed the 21st-tury girl the wrong way, — almost as much as the idea of letting civilisations and their memories fade into obscurity — but I also knew how much of a hassle it would be to keep a for every self-destructive little shithole in the gaxy and make sure to collee artefacts from there before they iably faced oblivion.

  Trazyn was still alert, his green gaze never leaving me for too long, and even if it did, I could hear small meical spiders scuttling around in ea watg me. He had nothing to fear from me personally; the bastard robably almost as slippery as I was when it came down to it with his surrogate bodies.

  He was basically a super lich, without the need for a phyctery and capable of possessing any Ne bodies whose mental cortexes he could easily overwhelm with his own mind.

  I suspected the only thing he had to fear from me was to suddenly go on a rampage and damage his prized artefacts. Especially since he used that overpowered spear as a walking stick. The Empathic Obliterator, a on that could destroy armies with a swing, was reduced to a walking stick. The Old Ones would weep at the sight if they weren’t all too dead to care.

  “I’d be ied in seeing some if you don’t mind?” I asked, feeling a bit stumped at how genuine I was being with a ky, old space skeleton. Oh well, there was little I had to hide from Trazyn, and most of his sensibilities were things I agreed with — aside from whatever drove him to kidnap me. That was dumb, though wele in hindsight.

  “I suppose we could take a route in their dire,” he hough his green burning gaze stared at me with a measure of suspi. ‘What is in those exhibits you want, beautiful and unknowable stranger?’ was written on his … aura — since he cked a facial expression. Though I doubted he used those exact same words in his mind.

  From there, he led me through a slew of smaller and rger exhibits. We made our way through the few he had of aerra, with me barely managing to hold back a snicker as he regaled me with the tale of how he got his hands on a piece of silver maery from the Admech priests at great cost to himself.

  How it must have had sious importao that subsect of the priesthood of Mars and some such. How hard they fought to keep it and how old the damhing was.

  In short, it was a toaster. An hoo-god, old, soviet style toaster with its rge bulkiness and simplicity. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the thing turned on the moment I plugged it in even after 40 thousand years.

  From there we ehe weirder parts, with strange alien architecture taking the pce of the previous Roman and early Gothic architecture. He had fossilised remains of strange aliens, pnts, statues, and other kniacks of dubious in and funality.

  I took everything in like an er schoolgirl on her first school trip to the national museum. I was in a space museum the size of a p, built with nanomaes by a ky skeleton.

  He’d be an ‘uploaded person’ in a regur sci-fi setting, wouldn’t he? Bio-transference is just basically creating an artificial mind based on your biological brain and then shoving it into a meical body. Hmmmm.

  He had so muteresting stuff. I leasantly surprised that I could still appreciate art and historical artefacts even without them having something to give me. Sure, there was the occasional time-frozen animal with descriptions that made me tempted to just … take a little nibble.

  I held myself back since I was enjoying this little excursion. I wasn’t going to ruin it by taking something I could get either way ter. Plus, I had some ideas for Trazyn, and maybe a possibly mutually beneficial partnership.

  … we didn’t find van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the end, didn we? Shame. It might be out there somewhere, but I didn’t hold out much hope. Which meant the st piece of art from my time was the Mona Lisa now hanging from Trazyn’s walls. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that, but it surely beat having it in some Governor’s colle.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” Trazyn interrupted my brooding. “While I myself know the value of remembering history and respeg its a artefacts, few share my view. Even among my own kind. I couldn’t help but be curious about what drove you to be.”

  “I suppose culture?” I shrugged. “Where I grew up destroying a artefacts was seen as a deplorable act. Tet one’s — or other’s — history is to refuse to learn from the mistakes and triumphs of our aors. Anyone who vandalised historical artefacts was seen as a savage or a fanatic.”

  “A culture trait I wish was more prevalent in axy,” he gave an artificial sigh. “I was uhe misception though, that you do not know what you are?”

  “I do not,” I smiled. “But I know what I was.”

  We walked side by side now, walking down a strauhat slowly transformed from some natural design that appeared like vines were grown to cover the walls like aper to normal dirt. If I didn’t know where we were, I would have mistaken the pce to be the entrao the burrow of se creature.

  “You want to know what I was?” I asked with a smirk.

  “I do,” he admitted. “Though I was more w about the implications of your current state being artificial.”

  “I doubt it's replicable,” I shrugged. “The ohat did it are quite dead, the materials to do it are either unavaible or exhausted and the catalyst even isn’t likely to repeat itself ever again.”

  “If you are capable of what you cimed, one of you could be camitous enough to most civilisations.”

  “True,” I shrugged. “I don’t io make more of me, either. I quite like being a singurity.”

  “Let us backtrack,” he said. “You mentioned having been part of a rger culture before?”

  “I did,” I said. “Though I’m afraid my kind and whatever culture we had has been ed into something unreisable and repugnant over the millennia.”

  He just hummed and somehow mao throw me a side-eye with those glowing green orbs of his.

  “I was a human,” I shrugged, deg I had little to lose by admitting it. “Ba the 21st tury.”

  That made him stumble and whirl around to stare at me, which was quite creepy, with the metallic death-mask wearing that annoying smirk and sp two unblinking eyes. There was a hunger in those unliving eyes, a hunger for knowledge that couldn’t be satisfied even if one lived till the stars went dark.

  “A human,” he murmured, tilting his head as if trying to verify my cims. “A human?”

  “Yes,” I shrugged. “Your culture might be the same as it had been millions of years ago, but mine is not. I do not find anything familiar in today’s humanity and nor do I particurly identify with anything they stand for.”

  “Uandably so,” he nodded, recolleg himself and straightening up. “That was quite the shock … The earliest humans I ied with were already in the 31st millennium. I would be very ied in early human history.”

  “I’m sure we e to an agreement,” I said. “You have quite a few things I would very much love to get my hands on.”

  “Do I now?” he tapped his thoughtfully while staring at me. “Am I right in presuming you are somehow aware of what I have in this Gallery?”

  “I just know one or two unfortunate fellows who found themselves frozen in time and might be in here somewhere,” I shrugged. “Fellows, who I would very much love to … sample.”

  “Sample, is it?” he hummed. “Not take? Free? Kill?”

  “Not at all,” I shrugged. “Though if you have multiple and ones you would be willing to part with entirely, having the full body would be better, but it's not a must. I gain the same thing from a single drop of blood.”

  “Do you fancy yourself a genealogist?” he asked.

  “Not quite,” I smirked. “I like variety in my diet, and I am something of a colleyself.”

  “If it really is just a drop of blood you hat is hardly an issue on my part,” he said, eyes narrowed as he seemed to be thinking deeply. I would have loved to know what he was thinking, what he thought I would do with some blood and such. “Do you have anything in mind?”

  “I have quite a number of them,” I smiled. “Any alien biological sample from species or individuals with strange or iing abilities is wele, but I have a few specifies in mind too.”

  “Do tell,” he said, just as we ehe room. It really looked like what I thought the insides of an anthill looked like. But instead of ants, horrendously ugly human-sized bug-things dotted the exhibit here and there.

  I reized them and grinned. “Something like these, for example. I always wondered how their straime-manipution worked.”

  He hummed. “The Hrud. I doubt it's biological in nature.”

  “Worth a try,” I shrugged.

  “Worth a try?”

  “It would be better to show it,” I said. “But we would o take the sample bay avatar and you would have to let it … eat the sample.”

  He seemed to be deep in thought. ting the pros and s of riskiing my avatar do some weird alien bullshit, no doubt. I had made creating this drone look like I just spat it out like a hairball. Which seemed to fuse the archivist to no end.

  “I have refrained from asking about your more unique capabilities up until now for proprieties’ sake,” he said. “But I would like to ask why would you like to ‘eat’ those samples and what would happen if you did so.”

  “Nothing would happen, outwardly at least,” I shrugged. “Not if I didn’t want anything to happen. I am capable of perfectly uanding the geic makeup of creatures I sample.”

  “An intriguing ability,” he said. “Would it be simir to what the ‘Kroot’ are capable of, or would you liken it to the Tyranids’ capability to reverse engineer genes?”

  “The tter,” I said. “It’s trolled and instinctual. Kroot eat whatever they stumble upon and hope for the best oute. Tyranids experiment with clear goals in mind.”

  “I suppose it couldn’t hurt,” he said after a few seds. “You would like a Hrud ‘sample’?”

  “Now that you mention it …” I trailed off, gng at the repulsive humanoid worm-things. They had fist-sized pure bck eyes on a chitinous head devoid of a nose or an ear with the mouth of a mprey stu the middle.

  They had long worm-like legs and arms even longer, almost brushing the ground as they stood hunched over.

  These were the sort of things that would give nightmares not only to children but seasoned guardsmen. Not that most survived long enough to have nightmares about them, the disgusting things had an aura-like ability that aged everything around them to death.

  ons short-circuited, rusted, and deposed while the humans wielding them turo thousand-year-old ash in the blink of an eye.

  “Yes, I think these would do perfectly.” I grinned. Ugly as they were, they had a broken ability which I really wao get my hands on.

  Maybe this would be the breakthrough I o uand how Mephiston maniputed time.

  P3t1

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