Shmuel stood encased in the cold, rivet-studded tomb of his own making. He was the Remains of a Metal Ship, a distortion born from the rejection of the shore.
Water began to weep from the seams of his plating. It poured from the joints of his hydraulic legs and trickled from the vents of his engine-like torso. It smelled of brine and deep, stagnant oceans. The floor of the sterile laboratory flooded, the pristine white tiles disappearing beneath a rising tide of dark, murky liquid.
Common sense dictates that an object is defined by its history.
A thing is what it was, carried forward through time.
But the history of the thing in the tank had been severed.
The history of the man in the armor had been drowned. If the connection to the past is broken, the identity collapses.
The mind struggles to bridge the gap, desperate to draw a line between the "before" and the "after," but in this room, the line had been erased.
Shmuel moved.
The inertia of his new form was terrifying. He surged forward, the floor cracking under his tonnage, aiming straight for the Bishop.
The Knight Piece intercepted him.
The white-clad warrior moved, the sword slashing.
Steel met the hull of the distortion. Sparks showered like fireworks. The blade carved deep gouges into Shmuel's plating, screeching as it dragged across the uneven metal surface. The force of the strikes was immense, enough to cleave a normal man in two, but against the Remains, they were merely waves crashing against a cliff.
Shmuel halted, his momentum checked by the sheer volume of the attacks. The Knight slashed at his joints, at the vision slit, at the exposed cabling of his neck.
While the Knight held the beast at bay.
Ernst stepped back to the ruptured machinery of the grinder. He did not look at the blob of flesh with pity or disgust. He deposited the writhing mass of Bruno back into the nutrient tank, the fluid splashing around the reconstituted meat. He sealed the breach with a temporary mag-lock. The cargo was stowed.
Ernst turned. He unslung the matte-black staff from his back. He joined the Knight.
The Bishop and the Knight struck in tandem. The staff slammed into Shmuel's midsection, delivering a kinetic shockwave that rattled the internal skeleton. The sword struck the same spot milliseconds later, aiming to pierce the weakened armor.
Shmuel did not falter. He absorbed the blows. The pain was distant, filtered through layers of steel and hatred.
"Why do you hesitate?"
The voice bloomed in the center of his consciousness, warm and cloying, vibrating against the wet walls of his mind.
"You know the truth. The planks were stripped away one by one. The keel was rotted and swapped for iron. The sails were burned and replaced with smoke. You look at the thing in the tank and your mind screams that it is a stranger."
Shmuel swung his hydraulic claw. The Knight ducked, the wind of the blow rustling his white uniform. Ernst vaulted over the sweep, landing gracefully on a console that crumpled under his weight.
"Common sense tells you that if you call it by the same name, it remains the same object," the voice whispered, sliding between his thoughts like oil. "But that is a linguistic trick. A comfort for the weak. You are not weak, Shmuel. You see the rupture. You see that the continuity is a lie."
The water leaking from Shmuel's chassis began to defy gravity. Droplets hung suspended in the air, vibrating with potential energy. They coalesced, drawing together into dense, swirling spheres of liquid.
The heavy, segmented tail attached to Shmuel's spine lashed out. It did not strike the enemies. It struck the water. The tail tip grabbed a hovering sphere, the metal prongs manipulating the liquid, compressing it, absorbing it into the internal reservoirs of the distortion.
Pressure built.
Shmuel raised his left arm.
A jet of water erupted from the aperture.
A solid lance of liquid moving at supersonic speeds. It struck the far wall, punching a hole through the reinforced concrete as cleanly as a diamond drill. If a human had been standing there, they would have been misted.
The Knight and Ernst scrambled, diving in opposite directions as Shmuel tracked them. He fired again. A server bank exploded, showering the room in sparks and glass. He fired again. The floor erupted, sending jagged shrapnel flying.
The identity of an object is often tied to its function. A ship is a ship because it sails. A knife is a knife because it cuts. But when the ship sinks, it becomes a reef. When the knife breaks, it becomes scrap. The thing in the tank no longer functioned as Bruno. It functioned as raw material. Therefore, by the cold logic of the universe, it was no longer Bruno.
From the crater in the floor, the Rook Piece rose.
His armor was dented, his chest plate concave where Shmuel had crushed him, but the biology of the ChessPieces was designed for endurance. Bones knit together. Pain was suppressed. The Rook retrieved his fallen spear.
He charged.
Now there were three.
The Knight, the Bishop, the Rook.
The Knight drew Shmuel's attention with a flurry of strikes to the faceplate. The Rook drove his spear into the knee joint, trying to sever the hydraulic line. Ernst circled to the flank, swinging his staff with bone-shattering force against the spine of the distortion.
They were elite. They were the pinnacle of Izan's martial power.
And they were nothing compared to the Remains.
Shmuel roared, a sound of grinding gears and escaping steam. He ignored the spear in his leg. He ignored the dents in his armor. He spun, his tail whipping out like a flail. It caught the Knight mid-air, slamming him into the ceiling with a sickening crunch.
He grabbed the Rook by the head with his oversized claw. He threw. The Rook flew across the room, crashing into the bank of monitors, shattering the image of the grinder into a thousand jagged pieces.
Ernst struck Shmuel's arm, trying to break the weapon mount. Shmuel simply backhanded him. The metal fist connected with the staff, bending the weapon and sending the Bishop sliding across the wet floor until he hit the far wall.
Shmuel stood in the center of the devastation, water dripping from his hull, steam rising from his vents. He was stronger than them. He was heavier than them. He was a monument to a grief that outweighed their physical existence.
"The ship change," the voice cooed, echoing in the cavernous empty space where Shmuel's humanity used to be. "The ship was unmade. The wood was burned. The nails were melted for bullets. The name 'Bruno' is just paint on a tombstone."
Shmuel turned his gaze toward the tank. The mag-lock held the breach shut. Inside, the flesh drifted.
The problem of the Ship of Theseus rests on the assumption that there is a correct answer. It assumes that there is a threshold where "A" becomes "B." But the mind hates ambiguity. The mind demands a binary state. Is it her? Or is it not her?
Shmuel had accepted the answer.
It was not her.
"It is an insult," the voice said, "It is a mockery of the thing you cherished. To let it exist is to admit that your love was for the material, not the soul. If you truly loved the ship, you would not let it rot on the ocean floor, inhabited by bottom feeders. You would give it a Viking funeral. You would burn it until there was nothing left to mock you."
Shmuel leveled his water cannon at the tank.
The Knight struggled to his feet, blood leaking from his white mask. The Rook pulled himself from the wreckage of the monitors. Ernst straightened his suit, though his breath came in ragged gasps.
They threw themselves at him again.
The Knight leaped, sword point aiming for the vision slit. Shmuel caught the blade in his bare metal hand. The edge bit into the alloy, but stopped. Shmuel squeezed. The high-grade steel of the sword shattered. He punched the Knight in the chest, caving in the ribcage and sending him flying back into the slurry of the flooded floor.
The Rook threw his spear. It glanced off Shmuel's shoulder plate, sparking uselessly. Shmuel fired a water sphere. It struck the Rook in the midsection. The impact was like a cannonball. The Rook folded, vomiting blood, and collapsed.
Ernst stood his ground, staff raised, but his eyes betrayed a flicker of calculation. He knew the math. The variables had shifted. The Remains were durable beyond the projected limits of the distortion.
"Burn it," the voice commanded. "Sink it. Destroy the evidence of the crime. As long as that flesh exists, you are tethered to a lie. You are trapped in the paradox. End the paradox. Scuttle the ship."
Shmuel walked toward the tank.
The water around his feet boiled with the heat radiating from his core. His hatred was a furnace. He hated the flesh. He hated the tank. He hated the name Bruno. He hated himself for remembering the chess games. He hated the continuity of memory that insisted on linking the girl with the medal to the blob in the jar.
He wanted to sever the link. He wanted to break the chain of causality.
If he destroyed the present iteration, the past iteration would remain pure in his memory. If he wiped the slate clean, the drawing that used to be there would no longer be defaced by the scribbles of the present.
He reached the tank. The glass was cracked, the mag-lock humming.
Ernst struck him from behind, the bent staff slamming into the back of Shmuel's knee. Shmuel didn't even stumble. He turned his head, the red slit of his visor glowing with malevolent intensity. He swatted Ernst away as one would swat a fly. The Bishop tumbled across the room, sliding into the dark water.
Shmuel turned back to the tank.
He raised his heavy, mechanical fist. He prepared to deliver the blow that would end the paradox. He prepared to kill the thing that was not Bruno, so that Bruno could finally die.
"Yes," the voice whispered, trembling with ecstasy. "Do it. Free yourself from the ambiguity. Make the world simple again. Dead is dead. Gone is gone. There is no replacement. There is only the end."
Shmuel had stopped telling the story. He had stopped believing in the narrative of the self.
There was no self. There were only parts. And these parts were wrong.
He pulled his arm back. The servos whined. The water in the room rippled away from him, pushed back by the sheer pressure of his intent.
The destination was clear. The ship must sink.
Ernst slid across the wet tiles, his white suit stained with gray slush and engine oil. He came to a halt near the primary control console, coughing once, a sharp, wet sound that betrayed a cracked rib. He looked at the Remains of a Metal Ship towering in the center of the room.
He tapped his earpiece, though the connection was static-filled. He looked at the Knight and the Rook, who were dragging themselves out of the wreckage, their movements sluggish, their biology straining against the damage.
"We cannot kill it," Ernst stated. "Its armor density exceeds our output. We are merely chipping paint off a dreadnought."
The Knight spat a tooth onto the floor. "Then we die holding the line?"
"No," Ernst said. "We buy time. The Successor is not just a vessel, she is a weapon. If she wakes, she survives. If she sleeps, she is scrap."
He reached into his jacket and produced a heavy, brass key with a complex, clockwork head. He inserted it into a dedicated port on the console, a slot that looked archaic amidst the digital touchscreens.
"Authorization: Ernst. Bishop Grade. Activating T Corp Partnership Protocol."
The monitor flared with a sepia light. A low, rhythmic thrumming began to emanate from the machinery beneath the floor. Thump-tick. Thump-tick.
"TT2 Protocol." Ernst said.
The air around the grinder and the nutrient tank warped. The colors desaturated, turning into the grainy, flickering hues of an old film reel. The sound of the fluid bubbling inside the tank pitched up, becoming a high-frequency whine.
T Corp's Singularity did not create time; it harvested it. It took the wasted millennia of WARP trains and bottled them, selling the seconds to those who could afford to rush god. Izan had paid a fortune for this reserve, intending to use it over weeks to perfectly cure the biological cement of their new Queen.
Ernst twisted the dial to maximum. He was burning the budget of a small nation in real-time.
"The maturation cycle takes 2 weeks," Ernst said over the rising hum of the temporal field. "I am compressing it. But biology has limits. If I go faster, she will liquefy. We need five hours."
The Rook gripped his spear, his knuckles white. "Five hours? Against that?"
"Five hours," Ernst confirmed. "If we fall before the clock runs out, the Successor dies in the womb. Defend the tank. Defend your replacement."
Shmuel heard the shift in the machine's rhythm. He saw the sepia distortion enveloping the tank where the flesh-thing floated. He felt the unnatural acceleration of entropy in that specific corner of the room.
The ship was being refitted. The drydock was speeding up. They were rushing to launch a vessel.
He raised his water cannon.
The water spheres orbiting his hull spun faster, agitated by his fury. He did not care about their science. He did not care about their time. He cared only about the end.
He fired.
The jet of water screamed across the room.
The Knight Piece stepped into the path. He braced his sword with both hands, channeling every ounce of his enhanced strength into a defensive stance.
BOOM.
The water struck the blade like a physical hammer. The Knight was driven backward, his boots carving deep trenches into the concrete, sparks flying as his heels ground against the rebar. His arms shook violently, muscles tearing and reknitting in seconds, burning through his own lifespan to hold the blockade.
He stopped the stream three meters from the tank.
The Rook moved next, launching himself off a piece of debris. He didn't aim for Shmuel's armor; he aimed for the floor beneath the distortion. He drove his spear into the wet concrete and leveraged it, upending a slab of the foundation to create a barrier, a breakwater against the oncoming tide.
Ernst abandoned the console and returned to the fray, his staff spinning. He was the tactician, the one who patched the holes in their desperate dam.
Shmuel advanced.
The Remains moved. He smashed the Rook's barrier with a sweep of his tail. He battered the Knight's guard with his hydraulic claw. He flooded the room with more water, raising the level until it swirled around their knees, turning the battlefield into a treacherous, submerged pit.
Shmuel battered against them.
Minute one passed. The room was a ruin.
Minute five passed. The Knight's left arm hung uselessly at his side, pulverized.
Minute ten. The Rook was fighting on one leg, hopping through the water, thrusting blindly.
They stood between him and the lie. They stood between him and the false Bruno.
And behind them, in the sepia-toned silence of the time field, the shadow in the tank began to take shape. Fingers lengthened. A face molded itself from the blank slate. The clock ticked, stealing time from the future to pay for the sins of the present.
Five hours remained.
Shmuel roared, the sound vibrating through the water, and dragged his metal hull forward for another collision. The ship would sink them all.