A slight shift in the air currents behind him alerted Bobby to someone's approach long before any human would have detected the presence. He didn't bother turning around, instead listening to the cautious footfalls making their way through the underbrush—light steps, hesitant, likely female judging by the stride length and weight distribution.
"You might as well come out," he called without looking back. "Your attempt at stealth is embarrassingly ineffective."
The footsteps paused briefly, then continued with more deliberate purpose until a young woman emerged from the shadows. She was perhaps twenty years old, dressed in simple but clean garments, her dark hair bound in a loose braid that hung over one shoulder. What immediately caught Bobby's attention, however, were her eyes—pale gray and slightly unfocused, as if seeing something beyond the physical world around her.
Bobby sighed deeply. "What does the Oracle want?" he asked, his tone suggesting boredom rather than curiosity.
The woman froze, her expression shifting from determined to surprised. "How did you... I never said I was—"
"An Oracle?" Bobby finished for her, finally turning to face her directly. "You didn't need to. The signs are obvious enough to anyone who knows what to look for."
And he had seen them countless times before—across different timelines, different realities. Always women, always with that same haunted look behind their eyes. Prophets, seers, sibyls, oracles—the names changed with culture and era, but the phenomenon remained consistent. An evolutionary anomaly that appeared with predictable regularity throughout human development.
The woman stepped closer, her movements deliberate as if she needed to concentrate on each step. "My name is Medea," she offered. "I've been looking for you."
"I'm sure you have," Bobby replied dryly. "Let me guess—you had a dream? A vision? Voices whispered my location in your ear while you were in a trance?"
Medea's brow furrowed. "You mock what you don't understand."
At this, Bobby couldn't suppress a harsh laugh. "I understand far more than you can comprehend, girl. I've dissected the brains of dozens like you, mapped the neural pathways that create your 'visions,' identified the precise genetic markers that produce your condition."
He stood up, towering over her slight frame. "I understand exactly what you are—an evolutionary accident. A random mutation that allows your mind to perceive probability threads with greater accuracy than the average human. Impressive to your contemporaries, perhaps, but hardly mystical."
Medea took a small step back, clearly unnerved by both his words and the intensity with which he delivered them. "What... what is an evolutionary accident?" she asked, latching onto terminology she couldn't possibly understand in this era.
Bobby ignored her question. "You're dying," he stated flatly. A clinical observation, not an expression of sympathy. "I can see the degradation in your neural pathways from here. The visions are destroying your brain, one fragment at a time. How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one? You might have another year, perhaps two if you're fortunate."
The color drained from Medea's face. "How could you know that? The pains have only just begun..."
"Because I've seen it before. Oracles rarely survive past their mid-twenties. The human brain simply isn't designed to process the information your mutation forces upon it. The more powerful the visions, the quicker the deterioration." Bobby cocked his head slightly, studying her with detached interest. "Judging by your symptoms, yours are particularly potent."
Medea's hands trembled slightly, but she straightened her posture, refusing to be intimidated. "I came because I saw you in my dream. You, and an island surrounded by perpetual storms."
"Atlantea," Bobby supplied, unsurprised. The island's unique properties created ripples in probability that someone with her abilities might detect, especially if she had been actively seeking information about healing or survival. Or she simply heard it from someone that had found the island.
"Yes!" Medea's eyes widened. "You are its guardian, aren't you? The immortal one who watches over its secrets?"
Bobby's expression remained neutral. "I'm its custodian, in a manner of speaking."
"Take me there," Medea said, her voice suddenly urgent. "Please. In my vision, I saw that the island's powers could heal—could save me from this fate you describe." She stepped forward, hands clasped before her in supplication. "I don't want to die."
The raw fear in her voice momentarily caught Bobby's attention. Despite his countless years of existence, human fear of death remained a fascinating constant. No matter how advanced a civilization became, no matter how enlightened its philosophies, that primal terror lurked beneath the surface, driving behavior in predictable patterns.
"Death terrifies you that much?" he asked, genuinely curious. "It's the most natural process in existence—the end that gives meaning to everything that comes before it." A sardonic smile twisted his lips. "Something I'll never truly experience, ironically enough."
Medea's gaze became distant for a moment, that common characteristic unfocused look of an Oracle receiving information beyond ordinary perception. "You wait for someone," she murmured, the words coming as if from a trance. "Someone lost to you across the void of time."
Bobby stiffened slightly, his casual demeanor momentarily fracturing. "Reading my mind? Parlor tricks, Oracle."
"Art," Medea continued, the name falling from her lips like a stone into still water. "You wait for Art, but she will never be born into this world. Your presence has disrupted the flow of time—created divergences in the stream that cannot be reconciled."
For the first time since their encounter began, Bobby felt a flicker of genuine surprise. Oracles shouldn't be able to perceive across timelines—their abilities, while impressive, were limited to probability threads within their own reality. Art existed in a different branch of time altogether, one that had diverged from this current iteration due to his presence before her birth.
"How do you know that name?" he demanded, taking a step toward her.
Medea seemed unaware of his approach, caught in the grip of her vision. "I see her end," she whispered, her voice taking on a hollow quality that echoed strangely in the night air. "Alone among the stars, surrounded by countless debris, drifting in the endless void. Her final battle—"
She didn't finish. With a gesture that would have been imperceptible to ordinary human eyes, Bobby lifted her from the ground. Medea gasped as an invisible force closed around her throat, her feet dangling several inches above the forest floor.
"I could extinguish your life with a thought," Bobby said, his voice deadly calm. "If you're manufacturing these visions to manipulate me, I suggest you reconsider."
Medea's hands clawed at her throat, fighting against the telekinetic grip that constricted her airway. "Not... lying," she choked out, tears streaming down her face. "The dream... nearly killed me. Please..."
Bobby stared into her eyes, momentarily breaching the barrier of her thoughts with his own consciousness. What he found there was chaotic—fragmentary images of destruction on a cosmic scale, a figure standing defiant amid the ruins of worlds and stars.
But no comprehension. No understanding of what these images meant. Just raw, unfiltered information she had no context to properly interpret.
He released his telekinetic hold, allowing Medea to collapse to the ground, gasping for breath.
"At least she died in battle," Bobby said quietly, almost to himself. "As she would have wanted."
That was a lie. She would have wanted to die in his arms, but that is an impossibility, so he provided her an alternative.
Judging from the scale of destruction in Medea's fragmentary vision, Art's final stand would come billions of years in the future, after an unimaginable span of life. But time was not truly linear—it coiled and folded upon itself in ways human perception couldn't grasp. In some sense, Art was already dead. In another, she had not yet been born. In others still, she lived eternally in the moment of her greatest triumph.
Medea pushed herself to her knees, still struggling to catch her breath. "The island," she pleaded. "Take me to Atlantea. It's my only hope."
Bobby regarded her dispassionately. "The island would only accelerate your condition. Its energies enhance evolutionary potential—in your case, that would mean strengthening the very ability that's killing you."
"Then what hope do I have?" Her voice cracked with desperation.
Bobby considered her for a moment. He could, if he chose, help her—not by taking her to the island, but by precisely modifying the portion of her brain responsible for her prophetic abilities. He could effectively disable the mutation, allowing her to live a normal human lifespan without the burden of foresight.
It would require minimal effort on his part. A simple telekinetic procedure, delicate but well within his capabilities. He would need to splice her genetic code as well, ensuring the mutation wouldn't be passed to future offspring, but that too was trivial work for someone with his skills.
The question wasn't whether he could help her, but whether he should. Bobby had long ago stopped interfering in individual human destinies except when it served his broader experimental purposes. This woman's fate, tragic as it might seem to her, was ultimately insignificant against the backdrop of evolutionary development he was monitoring. Futhermore, her continued vision would give him some interesting insights.
And yet...
"I can help you," Bobby said finally. "Not by taking you to the island, but by removing the ability that's killing you."
Medea's eyes widened with hope. "You can cure me? Truly?"
"I can remove your prophetic abilities completely," Bobby clarified. "You would no longer receive visions or dreams of the future. You would live as an ordinary woman, with an ordinary lifespan."
"How? Are you a healer?"
Bobby dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. "The method is unimportant. What matters is your choice. Do you desire a normal life without your gift, or would you rather continue as you are, burning brightly but briefly?"
Medea didn't hesitate. "I want to live," she said firmly. "The visions bring nothing but pain and the fear of madness. I would gladly be rid of them."
"Very well," Bobby nodded. "Come closer."
Medea approached cautiously, still wary after his earlier display of power. When she stood before him, Bobby placed his fingertips lightly on her temples.
"This will be unpleasant," he warned. "But brief."
Before she could respond, Bobby reached into her mind with his psionic abilities, simultaneously creating a telekinetic field of extraordinary precision within her brain. With surgical accuracy, he identified the neural pathways that had developed the abnormal connections responsible for her prophetic abilities and began systematically disrupting them.
Medea gasped, her body going rigid as Bobby's consciousness interfaced directly with hers. Through this connection, he received flashes of her experiences—the terror of her first vision at age five, the gradual realization that what she saw often came to pass, the growing headaches and episodes of disorientation that had recently begun to plague her.
He worked methodically, making minute adjustments to her neural architecture while simultaneously rewriting portions of her genetic code to prevent the mutation from expressing itself in future generations. The procedure was complex but familiar—he had performed similar modifications numerous times across various timelines.
When he finished, Bobby withdrew both his physical touch and his psionic presence from Medea's mind. She swayed unsteadily for a moment before collapsing against him, unconscious but alive.
Bobby lowered her carefully to the ground, checking her vital signs with a practiced assessment. She would remain unconscious for several hours while her brain adjusted to its modified state, but upon waking, she would be effectively cured—an ordinary woman with no memory of her final vision and no ability to receive new ones.
As he arranged her in a comfortable position against the base of a tree, Bobby considered the brief glimpse he'd received of Art's supposed fate. The image troubled him more than he cared to admit—not because he feared her death, which was inevitable regardless of how long she might live, but because of what it suggested about the state of the universe in that distant future.
Bobby remained beside Medea's unconscious form for nearly four hours, his perfectly still posture betraying his inhuman nature. Had any passerby observed him, they might have mistaken him for a statue—a guardian figure placed to watch over the sleeping woman. But the secluded grove remained undisturbed through the long night hours, the only movement coming from nocturnal creatures that instinctively gave the immortal a wide berth.
As dawn approached, Medea's breathing changed, becoming lighter and more irregular. Bobby watched dispassionately as her eyelids fluttered, consciousness gradually returning. He had used the hours of her unconsciousness to run detailed calculations on the probability paths branching from this moment.
Most timelines showed Medea living a completely ordinary life after this encounter, perhaps reaching the respectable age of sixty or seventy before succumbing to the natural ailments of aging. A handful showed her dying younger—disease, childbirth, accidents. The mundane varietals of human mortality.
Medea's eyes finally opened, unfocused at first, then gradually sharpening as she took in her surroundings. When her gaze settled on Bobby, she flinched slightly, memories of their encounter clearly returning.
"You..." she began, her voice hoarse. "What did you do to me?"
Bobby rose smoothly to his feet, looking down at her with clinical detachment. "Exactly what I said I would. I removed the neural pathways responsible for your prophetic abilities. The headaches will gradually diminish over the next few weeks. You'll experience occasional disorientation as your brain adapts to processing sensory input normally again."
Medea's hands went to her temples, fingers pressing against the skin as if searching for evidence of his intervention. "I feel... different. Quieter somehow. Like a constant noise has suddenly stopped." Her brow furrowed in concentration. "I can't see the threads anymore. The possibilities."
"That was the point," Bobby replied flatly. "Your brain is no longer attempting to process information from multiple probability streams simultaneously. The damage already done will heal partially, but some neural degradation was irreversible. You may notice occasional memory lapses or difficulty concentrating on complex tasks."
Medea struggled to sit up straighter, leaning back against the tree trunk for support. "But I'll live? A normal life?"
"As normal as any human existence can be," Bobby confirmed. "I also modified your genetic structure to prevent the mutation from being passed to any children you might have."
At this, Medea's eyes widened. "You changed my... how is that possible? Are you truly a god, as some have whispered?"
Bobby's mouth twisted in a sardonic smile. "Gods are just humans with better technology or longer lifespans. Remember that if you ever feel tempted to start worshipping something."
He reached into the small pouch at his waist, removing several gold pieces—more wealth than most laborers would see in a lifetime. Kneeling beside Medea, he placed the gold in her trembling hands.
"Take this. It should provide you with sufficient resources to establish yourself somewhere. There's a merchant in Massilia named Elikos who trades in textiles. Tell him the man with the blue fire sent you, and he'll help you find legitimate employment."
Medea stared at the gold, then back at Bobby, confusion evident in her expression. "Why are you helping me? I'm nothing to you."
The question caught Bobby off-guard, not because it was unexpected but because he realized he didn't have a ready answer. Why had he helped this random human female whose existence was completely insignificant to his broader purposes? Was it merely a momentary whim, or something deeper?
"Perhaps I was curious about what you might become without the burden of foresight," he finally replied, the answer sounding hollow even to his own ears. "Or perhaps I simply decided to be merciful today."
Medea clutched the gold tightly, as if afraid he might change his mind and take it back. "Will I see you again?" she asked, and Bobby detected a note of hope in her voice that he found both predictable and tiresome.
"The beauty of your new existence is its unpredictability," Bobby said, rising to his feet once more. "For the first time in your life, you don't know what's coming next. Embrace that uncertainty."
Medea's expression suggested this was cold comfort to someone who had spent her entire life with at least partial knowledge of future events. "That's not an answer."
"No," Bobby agreed. "It isn't."
He stepped back, preparing to teleport back to Atlantea. The brief diversion in Massilia had not provided the distraction he'd sought, and this unexpected encounter with the Oracle had only added complications he hadn't anticipated. It was time to return to the island, to his observations and experiments, to the familiar solitude he had maintained for so long before Galea's extended stay had disrupted it.
"Wait," Medea called, struggling to her feet with obvious effort. "Before the procedure, I saw something—a fragment of vision so powerful it burned itself into my memory. Even now, I can recall it clearly."
Bobby paused, his curiosity momentarily piqued despite his better judgment. "And what was that?"
"You," Medea said simply. "Standing alone at the end of all things. When the last star has gone dark and the universe itself begins to cool toward its final state." Her voice dropped to a near whisper. "You remain. Watching. Waiting. The last conscious observer."
Bobby felt something cold slither down his spine—an unusual sensation for someone who had perfect control over his physiological responses. "You couldn't possibly perceive that far ahead," he said dismissively, though there was a tension in his voice that hadn't been there before.
"Perhaps not," Medea acknowledged. "But I saw it nonetheless. And you know what I saw after that?"
Despite himself, Bobby asked, "What?"
"Nothing," Medea replied. "Absolute nothing. As if all of existence—past, present, and future—simply ceased to be." She met his eyes directly, a spark of her former prophetic power seeming to flare briefly. "Whatever you're waiting for, I don't think it ever comes."
For a moment, Bobby felt an emotion he had not experienced in countless millennia: genuine anger, sharp and hot, surging through his artificially maintained body. His fists clenched involuntarily, and the air around him seemed to shimmer with suppressed energy.
"You know nothing," he said, his voice dangerously quiet. "Your primitive brain caught random glimpses of probability threads it couldn't possibly comprehend, and you presume to tell me what does or doesn't happen in a future beyond your comprehension?"
Medea took a halting step backward, clearly sensing the danger in his response. "I only shared what I saw," she said quickly. "I meant no offense."
Bobby forced his anger back under control with a concentrated effort, reminding himself that this human's perceptions were fundamentally limited by her biology and era. Whatever she believed she had seen was almost certainly a misinterpretation, a fragment of vision distorted by her inadequate neural framework.
And yet...
The possibility that she might be right—that his eternal waiting might truly be in vain—was not one he cared to contemplate. Not after so many eons of maintaining his existence through the sheer force of will, he would never find it - the sweet embrace of death.
"Goodbye, Medea," he said finally, his voice once again neutral. "Use your new life wisely."
Without waiting for her response, Bobby activated his teleportation ability, his form shimmering and then disappearing entirely as he folded space around himself. The last thing he saw was Medea's face, a mixture of awe and terror etched upon her features as she witnessed his departure.
In the space between spaces, as his consciousness traversed the quantum pathways back to Atlantea, Bobby allowed himself a moment of pure, unfiltered emotion—something he rarely permitted. Rage. Frustration. And buried beneath those, a terrible fear that perhaps the Oracle had glimpsed some truth after all.
Then he was standing on the familiar shores of his island, the perpetual storms churning in the distance, exactly as he had left them. The unchanging nature of Atlantea usually provided comfort, a constant in a universe of variables. Today, however, it only served to reinforce Medea's ominous prophecy.
Standing alone at the end of all things.
Bobby pushed the thought aside with practiced discipline. He had work to continue. Experiments to monitor. A civilization in its infancy to observe as it took its first faltering steps toward what might—in some distant future—become a species capable of surviving not just its first great filter, but all those that would follow.
If he focused on that larger purpose, he could ignore the hollow feeling that had taken root somewhere in his artificial heart—a sensation distressingly close to despair.