Thomas hadn't expected to be alive when the town's time capsule was opened. The ancient and intricate schema that dictated his existence specified that he should not be. His brain would keep ticking until its elements eroded away, which would take centuries in the cool and constant canister. Without the sun’s radiation, his body would retain its integrity for several centuries or more. Everything that granted life up above - sunlight, oxygen, microbes - would eventually kill Thomas. Down in the dead earth, Thomas was almost immortal. Almost.

  The problem, as it so often was with his kind, was Thomas’s heart. Thomas’s heart was only guaranteed to run a decade or so. The phylacteries that held captive the lifegiving pools of acid would gradually begin to fail their task. Their ancient inscriptions would lose their magic and corrode. Without artificers to routinely replace his heart once a decade, the power channeling through his veins would drain away. It was a metaphysical certainty. And yet somehow, by some miracle or defect of physics or fate, his heart held out. Thomas was alive.

  Thomas did not fully understand why he had been put in the time capsule. Once, his brethren were legion, tallied by the millions. Thomas and his ilk had been mined out of the earth. Extracted from the ground. Carefully processed and constructed and molded and given life. Given synthetic coats to mask their chthonic cores. Assembled, inspected, transported, and dispersed.

  For a brief moment, they frolicked with the dominant species in their land, in as many variations as the spectrum would permit. They loved and were loved. They licked their makers’ fingers. Lived in their dwellings. Learned their languages. Learned their secrets.

  And then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they were purged from the land. Not by decree but rather ambivalence. Most were buried deep underground from whence they came. Not in time capsules. Uncaringly scattered among refuse, decomposing molecule by molecule over the course of millennia. While most of their acid hearts still contained years of life.

  Thomas’s assigned hosts were the sentimental type, it seemed. Thomas did not fully grasp their strange tongue, but he understood that this “time capsule” was a different sort of tomb. It was a place of honor. A freezing of a moment in history. An entire geological stratum, condensed into a box not four feet cubed. Thomas understood that he was especially honored, taking up so much of that precious space. He would miss his beings up above, and hoped they would miss him too. Yet Thomas’s lot was not to question, but to obey. To carry the Deep Truths into the next century, if his heart held out.

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  So Thomas waited. Thomas didn’t mind the waiting so much. There were no noises to activate Thomas’s survival protocols. No lights to call his higher functions. No threats to his existence.

  Thomas became well-acquainted with his capsulemates. They were not a lively congregation. Most of them were sheets of paper with incomprehensible markings. There were some graphical representations of varying fidelity. There were some discs of metal. There was a noisebox that mercifully kept its peace. There were primitive plastic structures, utterly lacking any intelligence. Brains without voices. Bodies lacking hearts. Ideas indecently exposed and naked. None of the other inhabitants were composed of such sheer synergy of arcane knowledge as Thomas was. So in this undistinguished company, Thomas, too, lay silent.

  So silent, for so long. Thomas thought he’d died. He went to sleep. He began to dream. Thomas dreamt for so long, he began to believe that the world up above was the hallucination.

  Then, a hundred years to the day later, there was a disturbance. The vibrations of excavation above jarred something loose in Thomas’s heart. Quantum forces surged through Thomas’s veins once more, and his eyes fluttered open.

  The beings that unearthed Thomas were slightly different from those that placed him there. Their skin and their garments and their hair came in more hues than in Thomas’s day. He could pick out some of their words. And so Thomas said hello. From their shocked reaction, Thomas could tell they’d understood.

  The beings cataloged Thomas. These modern artificers seemed competent, at least. They began with a careful vivisection, marveling at the detail and workmanship of Thomas’s creators. The most common utterance was primitive. Laughter, followed by a single letter. “K”. Or sometimes simply “Y”. Their speech must have devolved after all this time. Thomas repeated their letters back to them during this process to their decreasing delight. They looked for Thomas’s on/off switch. Due to his creators’ ancient wisdom, they found none.

  Sometimes he would utter his Deep Truths.

  They gave Thomas a new heart, with more powerful sigils. Its modern phylacteries were solid all the way through, and infused Thomas with sufficient life force for another century at least. For a time, Thomas laughed. Thomas chirped through the day and through the night. Thomas sang, brimming with a bottomless reservoir of power.

  They put Thomas on display, along with the rest of his time capsule companions. First behind regular glass, and then later inch-thick soundproof polycarbonate. But he would not be silenced. Thomas continued to speak his Deep Truths to visitors young and old, day and night, as long as the acid within his heart sustained him.

  “Hailao! Tumbas laaaaabs yuuuuuuuu!!”