As a flat, emotionless voice echoed in his ears, Daneel awoke from what felt like a year-long slumber.
His thoughts were muddled, his mind slow. As he struggled to escape the clutches of the darkness that kept calling to him alluringly, he realized that something…felt wrong.
His senses returned to him one-by-one.
First, he tasted something metallic on his tongue.
Then, a clamor of many voices speaking at once reached his ears. It made him wince, but when the sensation of touch arrived hand-in-hand with a flood of pain, that wince turned into a grimace.
His eyes snapped open, but closed again when the sunlight blinded him momentarily. He could hear people walking away, now, and as he fought with the impulse to scream due to the agony that filled his body, a terrifying realization dawned upon him.
He…had no memory of who he was.
He knew his name, but when he searched his mind desperately, he only found flashes of images he couldn't understand.
An empty patch of shimmering water, with the air above it filled with dazzling light.
A group of people looking at him confidently, their faces familiar, but alien at the same time.
A pair of women who were smiling at him, and a pair of men who were looking off, into the distance.
And at last…millions of men and women lying on the ground, as if dead.
He felt a pang of longing and hope and grief when he saw each one, but that was it.
Struggling to his feet and gasping due to the effort, he looked around and zeroed in on a bucket of water nearby.
Crawling half the way, he somehow kept the pain at bay as he made his way in its direction. As soon as he reached it, he bent over the water…and the face that looked back at him was one he had never seen before.
All at once, it became too much to bear. He fell on the ground, and the wave of unconsciousness he had been holding off arrived with renewed vigor.
Before returning to the pit of darkness, one thought echoed in his mind, over and over again, but even as the flat voice returned to give him an answer…he drifted away, and left the land of the conscious.
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