What have I asked for from this life? Peace? Love? Hope? I have never asked for it. I have wished. Wished to touch someone so softly I can feel the body's landscape with each whirl and ridge of my fingertips. Wished to wake up in the morning green like new leaves, fresh and quivering. I've longed to walk more than two steps without a care of what will happen in the next two steps. Wished, in fact, that I could set out walking in one direction and years later find myself in the same spot, full, content, larger. I have wished that I knew what love was.

Love! What more than a science experiment half fulfilled in my life? My family was creating a thing of beauty in me, raising it, engineering a skeleton, adding flesh and animation, and halfway through they were killed. And I am left, a monster. Shambling through life. Taking instructions from anyone who gives it to me. Hideous and terrible, worthless. People stare and scream or cheer and wave or glare at me with hate. I am a freak. Who can teach me the rest of love? Who can make me whole? There are parts inside of me that turn without purpose. Gears that grind for nothing. My heart must be pale, yellow, wan.

I have wished to go back again to that time. I believed everything. I was peace and my cadre was hope and love. My father taught us diligence, my mother taught us grace. We trained every day with instruments of joy. Oh the depth of my soul! What silt has been deposited that you've learned to settle so well!

And there we were. At an empty intersection in an empty area of the outlays, waiting for the next transport. Waiting like nothing more than chattel, ferried off as so much movable property. And I wished that where we were going, the people would like me.
Cadmus looked at me, "Get over it, Aaron."
"We'll take care of you." Said Balthasar.
"Yeah. Hope and Love."
They looked at each other and shrugged. Those gears, those gears.