Dawson City, Yukon

He was mechanical by nature, by default. He had spent his childhood taking apart, piecing together. Always questioning the tick of time; how the gears of a clock resembled human internals; how a metallurgic pulse could go on, beat after beat, for Time Immemorial.

His early days were spent playing on the exoskeletor remains of dredge equipment sacrificially left to leach elemental elements to the northern sky. Perhaps the basic principles of machinery were learned there; the realization that for a machine to function it required all the pieces; fascinated with the idea that a machine could simultaneously die and yet be revived; come back to life; how it could outlive the very mind that had built it; the hands that constructed it. How a machine could outlive a human being, and in that way the human himself withstood the test of time.