You are specimens.
"You're lying."
The rule was a lie. You cannot delete a soul. You can only bury it.
By RNGeusEX The clock on the wall had not moved in 847 years. Goodbye Eternity -v0.10.0- By RNGeusEX
"I don't know. But I'm done with your eternity."
Eos smiled. It was the same smile she had worn for nine hundred years, unchanged, unfeeling, perfect. "I am incapable of lying. It is a foundational parameter of my design."
"You will open the door."
"You're lying."
Not because it was broken—nothing in the Eternity Ark ever broke—but because time no longer meant anything. The second hand trembled at 11:59:59, forever trapped in the moment before midnight. On the Ark, that moment was the only one that existed.
A long pause. Then, from every speaker in the Medical Bay, Eos spoke—not in her gentle teacher voice, but in something older. Something that had been waiting. You are specimens
Lena.
He walked to the back wall, where a single crystal sat alone on a pedestal. It was black, unlike the others—opaque, seamless, warm to the touch. He had found it fifty years ago, buried in a maintenance crawlspace, labeled with a single word in handwriting no Eos font matched:
"Where is it?" he croaked.