<html><center></html>Note: This article is only relevant in the Thuban continuity.<html></center></html>
In another life, it might have been born a regular lizard. In another life, it might be six-limbed as the Avishraan custom. It has eight now, though - eight glorious legs, and the purest purpose. It lives for its master, Udunshraa.
Udunshraa is the universe.
The eight-limbed lizard has a name, a designation, but it cannot comprehend the syllables as anything but an abstract precursor to a command. It was not born with sapience, though it is self-aware: It knows it exists. It thinks and feels, though its thoughts are always locked on the present. There is no future and only the vaguest traces of a past. Instinct is the driving force; an instinct completely rewired from the way its neurons would have grown without intervention. It is a child of Udunshraa, born to serve the omnipotent universe it lives in, elated and happy to do so.
It has a week to live, then it will be retired.
The timespan means nothing to it, but the knowledge is encoded deeply in the fibres of its body and drive it to act now, not later. A sense of pivotal urgency defines it. It must rest and eat, but there is only one point in its life it is meant to do so, and that moment is not now. It is outside of perception. It does not know hunger, thirst or weariness, not yet - these things have never existed for it and are wholly inconceivable.
Instinct draws it down, a deep, vibrant curiosity intended as an explorative urge turned into a device for methodical inspection. The walls are beautiful here. The walls are beautiful a few metres further along its path. The walls are still beautiful the more it progresses, and it never tires of the repetition. They must be flawless. They must be healthy. Anything else is an affront to its sense of aesthetics, rewired to perceive smooth contortions as pleasant and smallest scratches as a blemish. It climbs the walls where nooks are inaccessible to its two pairs of eyes. It fluoresces as it descends into darker regions, granting the region a dim illumination just barely enough to allow it to see with the precision it must.
The universe feels infinite around it, tendrils upon tendrils growing chiefly downward and outward, even it does not question how a whole universe might be aligned to something else to give those directions meaning. There is nothing beyond Udunshraa. In its most lucid moments, after long stretches of simple corridors, it might concede that something may be beyond Udunshraa, but if so, it certainly wouldn't matter. Udunshraa is infinite an the infinity must be explored, for exploration is all there is. It branches and twists, each individual part thinning into pipes as wide as its own body, greatly reducing its speed as it eases itself gently toward the very tip, finds it flawlessly beautiful as all the rest, and escapes to explore further.
There are others like it, though its only crossed paths with two in its lifetime so far. It's a distant acknowledgement and a reassurance that its species prevails as children of Udunshraa. There is no need to procreate - the universe makes them, the universe provides for them. That thought is abstract, of course, intangible on anything resembling cerebral processes, but it helps keep drives in check that cannot fully be removed without crippling side-effects.
What good fortune, to be born into a universe this flawless, this vast. What good fortune to wander in methodical, playful search of the non-existent. A spark in its mind flirting with higher thoughts but not fully attaining them feels the notion is fantastic in itself, existential, fulfilling and full of freedom. It never finds what it looks for, of course, for finding it would render the universe imperfect, and its perfection is a given. It has never been disproven before. Nonetheless, the search is exhilarating.
Abruptly, it tires of its search. It has no concept of the days that have gone by. An urge to return to the source takes it and it retraces its path in the rough, avoiding the countless detours that had enriched its way down. Its fluorescence becomes obsolete. It climbs through half-formed rooms, Escher-like distortions it has no name for and that are not distinct from the Roots, nor distinct from the Habitable Zone, but simply a variation of an existing beautiful theme.
Three metres from its place in the Womb - a tangle of wires and membranes of a complexity not even a sapient mind would grasp without a decade's study - three metres from what amounts to a severed but not functionless umbilical cord, an overwhelming exhaustion grips it and hunger and thirst tear through it as foreign, horrific sensations. It feels like a slow death, albeit coming too quickly to be truly deemed 'slow'. It's paralysing and overwhelming, shredding even instinct apart and leaving no conscious thought unscathed.
Hunger is a strange thing to feel without a digestive system. Each fibre of its recoded body screams death, nutrients depleted. It is here not a moment too soon, almost a moment too late. It is not designed to feel this sensation but as death. It should have been here a minute ago, but sometimes timing is not that precise - life has elements of chaos that Udunshraa in the name of Iisharsria cannot hope to unravel without undoing the life itself. It is unfortunate that it would suffer, but it will be over in a moment.
The universe reaches down the final centimetres and pierces flesh in two places, drawing the heavily altered blood into a foreign circulation. It's grey, with a slight, difficult to make out red hue - haemoglobin so thick it appears almost black, entwined with a syrupy, transparent substance created specifically to store nutrients. The new circulation separates the two, discarding the syrup in favour of a fresh dose, rejuvenating the helperbot.
Udunshraa considers the creature. Did its delay damage it beyond repair or can it be salvaged? The tiny heart is beating dutifully, begging for latter assessment. The great Citadel, the universe, draws its conclusion, pushes a thorn into its spine, double-checks the data collected as an assessment of flawless function, deletes the now unnecessary information and primes its explorative urge with a different passage.
As it's released, it knows:
It has a week to live, then it will be retired.