"Why did you fight?"
"Because I didn't want to die, of course"
"Why didn't you want to die?"
"Because I want to live, of course"
"...Then, why did you want to live?"
That's obvious. It's because------
At the farthest limit of my memory.
Only that answer was different from before.
- Gun God, Notes.
Comet 1983 VII IRAS-Araki-Alcock was first detected on April 25 in 1983 by IRAS as a fast moving object. On May 3.6 UT, G. Araki identified this object as a new comet, and G.E.D. Alcock found it on May 3.9 UT independently. Total visual magnitude of this comet was about 9 on April 25, and Araki reported it as 6.5 on May 3.6 UT. The comet brightened rapidly due to its straightforward approach to the Earth, and reached the minimum distance of 0.0313 AU on May 11.5 UT. In recent years, such a close approach is an event of rare occurrence.
- Watanabe, J.-I., The rotation of Comet 1983 VII IRAS-Araki-Alcock
Begin transmission.
Retrieving archived memory from CE 3927.
The last records of the Gaian Terminal’s observation
Of the departure of our Gods.
The Answer Found
At The Heart of the World
0.
The sky on this planet is covered with scars.
Red like blood. Look closely and you can see them, where gashes had been torn into the heavens, where his blade had once clashed and tore apart that redness like skin and flesh. See there the true sky above revealed like an open wound, a crimson moon peeking through against the faintest trace of blue. It stares down, an eye in the heavens. Lights shimmer, an iris. A comet passes, like it blinks.
It’s here I wake up. Just a fragment of I, but just enough. Lying here, among snow and stardust. Conscious or unconscious for how long.
Few places remain on this planet, wrapped up in clouds and darkness, where one could see such a thing. This was one of them. A crumbling monolith cleft in two, its halves jut out from the earth, a gravestone weathered by wind and time and a millennium-past death. Like its descent had torn a hole through the cloud barriers like a blade through cloth, a gap in the pierced cumuliform layer exposing the sky that lies above, it rests in this crater, among fissures and glassed sands and broken earth. The corpse of the Cross.
It had died long before my homecoming, but I know of it all the same.
I, too, once died here.
Crumbling towers line the edge of the crater, bare pinpricks glowing faint on the horizon, the ruins of cities that once been my kingdom that lay crumbling from millennia of neglect. The War had long ended, but its scars on the earth remained. The children of Man who had once fought to protect it had long since left this dead earth. Left for the stars.
So I had thought, anyway. So you can understand my confusion as of now. It was what had always been expected of them, but I must have been wrong. Something else lives on this surface just yet.
I raise myself up from the crumbling pillars that once had been the Cross, now forming a plateau of sorts, making my way to its edge. Light filters down in pinks and golds and reds, casting a glow on the earth like a haze of heat. Something up in the sky illuminates the clouds, a river of shining lights like an aurora, blinking and flickering and flowing, as lights like distant stars ascend to join them, or descend to break away. I reach the precipice, overlooking an earth marked by strange ridges like veins. Standing here, kilometers above the ground, I see it. What remained of those who had stayed.
Fire and steel. There, far above in a distant city, two figures clash, one black, one white, the surface of their humanoid bodies metallic and crystalline, shearing sparks and steel each off the other with crashing blades. Grain suffuses the air. The earth trembles at each strike. Arcs of lightning, waves of heat, they draw scars across the sky as the earth crumbles and breaks apart like dissolving bone, taken into the blades at their hands.
A curious sight. It piques my interest; it draws my body towards them. I lean over the edge, weight little-by-little pulling at my body, until I descend into free-fall into the heart of the crater.
Wind bites into my body.
Cold seeps into my core.
And I fall.
As the dust settles from my landing, I notice the ground is littered with the corpses of angels.
I.
A doll-like body. Pristine white to the point of colorlessness, it nearly glows. It lies, eyes closed, hands folded across its breast, as if settled a serene sleep. It’s missing a wing and half its head.
Innumerable bodies lay scattered across the earth among fallen leaves and trees of stone, what once had been a forest. They lie, motionless and almost pristine— save for their various stages of disfigurement. Crumpled wings, broken bodies, scattered limbs; their interiors lie exposed to the elements, revealing nothing at all. Bodies devoid of true organs or internal structure. Crystalline figures like shattered statues. Weathering away, more like stone than rot. Thin layers of snow have gathered on their surfaces.
The ridges that had looked like veins up on the plateau had been the roots of an enormous tree, kilometers in size, its trunk split down the middle from the impact of the Cross, folded out like a pair of wings. Fragments of what had been its body, shattered and broken, jut out of the ground like blades planted in the earth, monuments to a long-past battle. They cast long shadows, towering above the forest.
A forest of stone and ice. No wind. No life. No sound.
Nothing stirred. Nothing at all.
The sun sets, and rises, and sets again. I make my way through the trees, silent as the forest itself, leaving no footsteps. As if a phantom in the land of the dead. Fragments of angels, though unmoving, watch me with glassy stares. Who is this stranger, who disturbs our grave of a thousand years?
On the second sunrise, I begin to hear sounds in the distance in the direction of the city. Louder, and louder. Thunderclaps like a distant storm. Eruptions and shockwaves. Tremors into the distance, vibrations visible in the air. The forest begins to thin as the path begins to incline, and the bodies and fragments of trees show signs of warping as if they had once suddenly melted and cooled. The snow at my feet becomes ice.
On the third sunset, I reach the edge, at the ruins of a former city.
Abandoned skyscrapers, monoliths of steel and concrete lined up in rows, some toppled over onto their sides, that seems to continue without end, extending beyond the horizon. What little else would have been left in a living city had long since rusted and rotted and weathered away. Nothing remained but decaying foundations, the fossilized skeletons of a lost civilization. Tombstones that reach the sky.
Waves of heat emanate from the heart of the city; through the rows of towers I see fire and lightning. Even after three days and three nights, they still fight.
They clash. Blade against blade, bone against bone, they each strike against the other with swords of ether, each swing sending up a shockwave, a gale, blotting out the sky in dust and smoke and sparks. The earth melts. Towers crumble. The ground at their feet glows red-hot with heat. There, in the eye of the storm, two figures lie locked into combat. Destroying everything about themselves but each other, neither can get the upper hand, a stalemate.
The figure in white whips up a firestorm with each swing, leveling skyscrapers, sending molten stone flying like rain. The figure in black rips apart skyscrapers with arcs of lightning, electromagnetic force sending beams of steel shrieking through the air like missiles. They gouge out scars into the earth through fire and steel.
Again and again, they clash. The air screams, rent apart with each swing of their blades. They dash across the sides of the buildings, sending each other smashing through the towers. Their skins of steel hold, scratched and battered and glowing from the heat, but still unbroken.
Until they break.
It happens in an instant. A bare moment of weakness, of lowered guard. The figure in black pierces the figure in white, its blade penetrating straight through its center. They freeze in the air, as if to contemplate each other, something silver dripping from its body and evaporating as it falls.
And then it falls, burning up like a comet.
Among smoke and dust and storms of flame, I see an angel.
The sun had risen and victor had left by the time I reach the crater, the site of their battle, a deep hole in the surface, molten rock starting to blacken and cool into glass, gorges carved into the earth still faintly glowing from the heat. Inside, labyrinthine webs of steel now lie exposed to the elements, the remains of an underground city. It was built around a river, as water rush into the gorges and flood into the hole in the earth. Blood red waterfalls trail into steam and mist. Broken beams and rubble form a pathway, a spiral downward into the darkness below.
I head down. I know not why I do so. I wander this earth aimlessly, without purpose, driven only by curiosity of this planet I’ve awakened to, and something that gnaws at me, and sense of hollowness, that something is missing.
I’m searching for something. Something here that once was mine.
Like webs, beams interlocking and protruding from each other like stalactites, with each step deeper into the city the light of the sun disappears, obscured by a mess of tangled concrete and steel. There is no logic to the labyrinthine architecture, as if it had all been built by random— stairs that loop into themselves, lifts that do not move, buildings with no floors or ceilings, halls and tunnels that lead to nowhere. I descend further, an endlessly repeating spiral staircase, the light of a surface just a bare pinprick, a single beam that shines down through its center as if an axis.
The underground structure expands, from a single shaft punched in the earth into a massive cavern, the remains of the city hanging as if the ceiling was the earth, and the abyss below was the sky. Echoing below from the darkness, I hear the distant footsteps of something massive, the groaning of mechanical joints, sending tremors in the earth.
I stand among ruins, among broken machinery and rusted steel, under a roof that stretches up to the cavern ceiling. A single ray of light shines down from the surface, illuminating a pile of rubble.
An angel sits there playing a guitar.
II.
The guitar is blue, its paint faded from wear and time, a stray wire dangling off the side. With it, it plays a song. I know neither its name or its tune, but it hums along with the melody. Neither overly fast nor overly slow, neither happy nor sad, it plays, eyes closed, metallic twangs and faint buzzing, plucking along at the strings with the notes it sings. Occasionally, it fumbles a chord and pauses in its humming, and tries again. Sometimes it gets it right. Sometimes it gives up, and sighs. And picks up where it left off.
A simple song.
It’s not particularly pleasant to listen to.
Well. That’s a bit rude, don’t you think?
It frowns as it says this, fingers pausing mid-strum, as it looks at me with a tilted head.
It doesn’t look like the angels from the forest. Whereas those had looked as if they were made of stone or crystal, this one looks more like flesh and blood, the form of a woman. Red haired, fair skinned. She has only a single wing.
A strange sight. A splash of color in a colorless land. She watches me with a tilted head.
Good morning, stranger.
I simply watch her in turn, scrutinizing her form. She seems unperturbed by such a thing.
You’re not a face I recognize around here.
Should I be?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. I’d thought I already knew of everyone left alive in this world. I’ve had a bit to get to know them, after all, but I suppose there’s always something left to surprise me. Unusual— that’s what it is. Unusual that I’d run into someone like you here.
Unusual like an angel who plays guitar?
She laughs. As if I could call it playing. I’ve had a thousand years to learn how, but I must say, I’m still quite shoddy. A overly dramatic sigh, a shrug of her shoulders. She half-heartedly plucks at another string. So why persist, on this fruitless endeavour? This futility? This struggle? She laughs. Well. Shoddy as my guitar skills may be, she seems to appreciate it all the same.
She?
The angel nods to her right, to a figure sitting in the shadows.
It sits there, hidden, tucked away under a small enclave in the rubble. Sleeping. Pale golden hair. A white dress, and the body of a child. A figure like that of a doll.
The angel hops down from her spot, and gently nudges the doll’s shoulder. It stirs, eyes blearily opening, revealing blood-red eyes. The doll yawns and rubs its eyes. She takes its hand as she approaches. Go on. Say hi.
The doll only stares at me from behind the angel’s legs.
The angel laughs. She’s a bit shy around strangers.
I only stare. The doll stares back at me.
A sense of unease. Anticipation. Irritation. Something swims in the depths of my memories. Like a reflection in water, quicksilver in hand; it slips through my grasp, between the fingers, dissolving into nothingness.
I remember nothing.
I ask. What are you doing, down here?
She laughs. I could ask the same of you. Well, Perun and Týr had finally had their fight, and I’m sure anyone on this half of the planet could see it. But, seen them once, seen them all. I’d come down here for some peace and quiet. Too noisy. Can’t even hear my own thoughts, or my guitar. She laughs again. Ah, am I getting old? Complaining about youngsters making a ruckus outside, ruining my beauty sleep? I won’t stand for it. They’re just as old as I am!
But yes. I thought I’d get away from the War, for little while.
The War?
Do you not know of it?
I know of nothing.
Oh?
I’ve had a long time to sleep.
Strange. She frowns, and stares at me for a while. Curiosity, suspicion. She drums her fingers across the base of her guitar. Everything within this star system must have been touched by Edem’s call. Even you, stranger.
I say nothing.
She seems to think over this for a while, and then laughs. Well, maybe you’re just a deep sleeper, and forgot about it within your dream. It has been a thousand years, after all. A shrug, at that, and she seems to think no more of it. The War is what it is. A continuation of the wars that came before, and every other war that ever was, after Edem felled the final TYPE one thousand years ago. The culmination of the efforts of our species. Waged not against armies or nations or horrors beyond the stars, but by Knights against fellow Knights.
‘I saved the world; thus it is mine.’
Thus was his declaration. Thus the world was reborn in his vision— a world of endless War.
A dramatic pause. And then she laughs. Well, that’s the dramatic way to put it. But in the end, his world was one where the War came not to us, but us to the War.
She ends it there, opting to instead fiddle with the pegs of her guitar. She frowns. Hey. Got any clue on how to tune a guitar?
I don’t, it turns out, but don’t respond.
Thus it is mine, Edem had said. A world that belonged to him. And what belongs to him belongs not to me.
Something stirs within me. Something like disgust.
The angel frowns. A slight tilt of the head.
I’m guessing that’s a no, then?
III.
Eventually, she decides to leave, having waited out the entirety of the battle on the surface. She takes the doll by the hand and invites me to follow.
And so we walk. She says she doesn’t feel like flying, as the passages and corridors are too cramped, and it’s just too awkward flying with a single wing. A pain in the ass, she says. The doll and I do not speak, while she chatters along in spite of our silence, her spirit seemingly lifted at finally having encountered another in this labyrinth of a city. She admits, that while she’d come in here because the noise and the racket had gotten on her nerves, she’d also forgotten the way out. Not that it matters, she says. She’ll take her time. Not like we can starve, anyway.
The corridor opens up into a vast open space, its ceiling stretching kilometers to the surface, with no floor in sight, its space empty and the cross-sections of the architecture exposed as if the city had abruptly stopped here, and large chunk of the city had simply been spirited away. A single strip connects the two sections across the gap, a bridge into the abyss.
Apparently unfazed, she walks along the bridge. As do I. And as we cross the gap surrounded by nothing but blackness and the steel beneath my feet I see something lurking within that abyss, some mammoth being walking along below us, metallic creaks and distant rumbling and the groans of something like a slumbering beast.
A Builder, she explains. You can watch it, if you like. I don’t think it’ll take much notice of you.
I peer over the edge. It looks like a crab, walking along the ocean floor on six spider-like legs, the size of skyscrapers, in slow-motion as if submerged underwater. It has a single limb that protrudes from its top, something like an eye swiveling about its base as claws at buildings and the cavern walls not yet hollowed, something within it glowing in the distance of molten metal, weaving steel beams and city structures like a spider weaves a web. There is no logic to its construction. Towers upon towers, in every direction, a chaotic web of steel and concrete. It simply builds, endlessly.
Once upon a time, our cities were destroyed faster than our human hands could rebuild them. Repurposed from our war machines, in the war against TYPES and their spawn, these colossi were created, autonomous machines that ate up the dead Earth and weaved it into cityscape. But the War ended, and these machines were no longer of any use to us. Vestigial. Extraneous. So I guess we just swept them underground, like sweeping your dirty laundry under the bed and calling it housekeeping. She laughs.
You didn’t shut them down?
We had long lost the method. Or the interest. Well, I was never an engineer. It’s quite silly, honestly. Like we just lost the keys to our house, or something. Ah, she says, a finger to her mouth, that doesn’t bode well for us, doesn’t it? Eventually, they’ll eat up the rest of the dead Earth, until nothing but the City remains, won’t they? It’s something we’ll have to deal with down the line. However many millennia it may take. Another laugh. I suppose foresight isn’t our strong suit. But who cares for the future, anyway?
Do you not?
Should I?
Humans once looked to the future. Lived for it.
We did. But I suppose all that passion has gone to waste. Maybe it’s that we’ve expended all our drive. Or maybe it’s that we’ve changed. Beyond appearance, the adaptations to Land of Steel, the Hundred Species that came out of the whole mess. Those have come and gone. Only one species matters now.
She plops down onto the edge of the bridge, legs swinging lazily over the abyss. The doll peers over her shoulder. She picks up a pebble from the rubble and tosses it, as it disappears into the blackness.
Those who answered Edem’s call. The Warrists.
Something inhuman?
Nay. The most human of all. It is only they who have any hope for the future, but it’s not the future of humanity. It’s of theirs. She throws another pebble down. An ordinary human has no more fear nor hope of death. When Edem felled the final TYPE that day, nothing remained to challenge him. The ultimate one that remained of this solar system. His vision of the world shadowed the light of the sun, until all the solar system became of his domain. And this was the world he created. He robbed us of our death.
A world of the undying. Eternal life, unchanging. A world there was always a tomorrow, whether you wanted it or not.
I ask her. And what does he want?
To return it to us. When we reach the same answer he did.
For in this world, she says, a wistful expression, True death is only for the Warrists.
I watch the Builder in the distance, watching it weave its web. The doll hides behind the angel’s back, like she’s afraid of the thing. And I, too, as I stare into the colossi lurking just beyond the darkness, feel a sense of unease. A sense of disgust and revulsion and a desire to see the thing a reduced to scrap and rubble. Hatred, one could call it. A strong emotion. An unfamiliar feeling.
It sees me.
The angel’s eyes go wide, as a beam of molten metal is sent screaming through the air hurtling towards us.
The explosion lights up the entire cavern, like another sun, a blinding white-hot light that illuminates the abyss as the bridge disintegrates into vapor and plasma, as a hole is pierced through the ceiling and the surface begins to cave in. We fall, the angel slowing her descent through her wings, maneuvering herself through burning rubble and molten metal. The wind answers my call and wraps me in a gale, breaking my fall into a float. A look down below, the underground city now light as day, and I see the doll falling into a blood-red sea.
I speed my descent. A reflexive decision. No thought or deliberation. Above me, Grain crystallizes about the angel’s body into enormous metallic wings, armor forming over her skin, the bones in her palm twisting into something like a cannon, as she sends beams of pure ether right back. Each site of impact subsequent explosion sends distant mushroom clouds rising from the floor of the abyss, vaporizing the blood sea, illuminating the cavern even further, light refracting through the vaporized water. My wind sends the doll up flying back into my arms, as I catch it and fly back up, as the angel maneuvers herself through the streams of screaming molten metal the Builder sends up at us. She yells over the noise, and I somehow hear her.
Well, shit. They’ve never attacked us like this before!
Arcs of molten metal and pure ether surge forth, each streaming by the other or clashing like novas, carving up the cavern and cleaving through buildings and blasting through the surface, as the city about us crumbles into dust and flame. The angel fires back, her batteries breaking and piercing its body, yet each blast looks to be but a bare pinprick in the far distance.
It refuses to fall. For each blast it takes, shearing and melting and vaporizing its armor, it takes up more of the earth, the surrounding cavern and constructed buildings, reforming itself anew. Something is keeping it alive. The angel recognizes this, and focuses fire, barrages intensifying tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, but the sheer distance it takes for her blasts to reach their target give it just the time it needs to build itself anew. She clucks her tongue. Have I gotten rusty? Even former Number Three never gave me this trouble.
The city begins to collapse into itself, as we weave through falling debris and broken buildings, the light of the surface blotted out by the rubble and dust. A skyscraper falls, swatting us out of the sky, crashing into one of her wings, as she blasts and reduces it to cinders in retaliation. And, doll in arms, we fall.
At this rate, we might die for real, won’t we?
She laughs. No despair or sorrow or ironic mirth, but real, genuine amusement.
And something about it makes me sick.
Blood laces through my arm.
Grain seeps into my palm.
I fall. Deliberately. Faster, now, I fall toward the colossus, friction of the air beginning to burn my body. At some point I must have let go of the doll, entrusted it to the wind at my command, as in my hand I hold a blade of bone, my arm warped and twisted, a grotesque form.
There lies the axis. The intersection of our trajectories. I fly alongside the ether beams the angel fires, residual heat causing my skin to blacken and char, past melting concrete and crumbling cities and at the very moment of impact, through flame and blinding light and craters of liquid metal sent crashing like ocean waves, I see its core and I cut—
IV.
It’s warm. Hot, even.
I wake up under a tree in a field of ashes, the angel sitting on a stump, idly playing her guitar. The sun beats down, somehow intense even through the haze of the blood cloud barrier, casting a dull red glow on a gray, desolate wasteland. The earth is dry and cracked, and littered with the shapes of fallen trees, though they look like they’re made of stone, and the wreckage of machinery that stand like monoliths. The sunlight stings my eyes. Irritating.
Good morning, stranger.
I feel something touching my arm, and look down. The doll sleeps beside me, her head rested against my shoulder. The angel laughs.
Looks like she likes you. Almost didn’t want to wake you up. You looked like sisters.
I frown, and move to get up. My limbs barely move, as if I’d lost control of them. They only twitch in response, vaguely responsive. Like circuitry that’d gone faulty.
I wouldn’t, if I were you. You took a nasty fall. I actually had to carry you all the way up here, and with only one wing, too! She laughs. I must say, though, I was surprised to see that you were a Knight, too.
‘A Knight’, she says.
I don’t understand. She frowns as I say this, looking at my arm.
I follow her gaze. It looks like a hunk of chiseled rock painted over with soot, as something like crystal protrudes out from underneath, breaking blackened skin in several places. As I look at it, the crystal slowly begins to retreat into itself, forming the shape of an arm, pale skin forming back over its surface.
And then it’s gone. Just a normal arm. I notice now, that I can move again.
I raise myself, stretching my legs. Its headrest gone, the doll slumps over and falls on her face, and only frowns at me as it wakes up. It looks at me with something akin to disappointment.
Where are we?
Outside. Nearest city’s not too far from here.
A city like this one?
Sort of. A little. Not really. The city I’m talking about actually has people living in it. Maybe a day or three of walking to get there.
And so we walk. She chatters on we do so, like she’d been doing in the city, somehow continuing her train of thought from before as if nothing had happened. I walk a bit behind her carrying the doll on my back, initially with difficulty, but eventually regaining in my strength, as I feel my body repair itself with each step.
We walk through ruins, among machines of war long dead or dormant, casting strange shadows on the landscape. The earth at our feet is mottled and blotchy, like shattered mosaic glass, with craters and gorges pooled up and lined with crystallized obsidian and silica. As we walk, I hear things like cries, low warbles and clicks that echo throughout the haze. Strange metallic creatures shift and scuttle as we pass, making crystalline nests in the barrels of cannons long rusted from disuse, or among steel webs on the frames of the tanks and colossi. They watch us as we pass, and I watch them, too, some with single glass-like eyes, or spider-like bodies, or humanoid or caninoid forms, and I realize that they, too, are machines, yet they litter and inhabit the landscape like beasts.
She ignores all of it as if it were nothing, and instead rambles on about her escapade to the abandoned city, of how noisy all the Warrists and their battles all are, of how you could probably hear their racket all the way from the moon or Mars, of how she hadn’t expected to find another Knight down in the ruins, of how happy she is that the doll had made a new friend.
But really now. You didn’t know you were a Knight? She clicks her tongue. You really don’t remember anything, do you?
A thousand years is a long time to sleep, after all.
She just laughs, again. What a world to wake up to. You remember anything from before then?
I shake my head. We reach a cliff, revealing the cracked flatlands we’d been walking along to be the surface of a plateau. Colossi like the Builders litter the landscape, each the size of a city, their unmoving bodies stretching to far beyond the horizon. The angel begins to descend the cliff, taking careful steps along a winding path that leads to its bottom.
Can we not just fly?
She frowns. Eh. I mean, we could. But it’s kind of a pain in the ass. Fly too low, and you have to dodge through all these ruins, or crash into a pillar. I only have one wing, you know! Can’t fly as well as I used to. Fly too high, and… I dunno. It’s just kinda chilly all the way up there in the sky.
We’re walking all this way because you don’t like the cold?
Huh? Are you worried or something? Oh, come on, don’t worry your pretty little head over it. Even if it’s slower, that’s no problem. We can take as long as we like. We have all the time in the world. She takes out a bar of something greyish and begins to munch on it.
At the bottom of the basin, more machines litter the landscape, living among the corpses of the Builders. Strange crystalline trees and flowers cover the bodies of colossi, like an overgrown city. They, too, watch us.
These machines…
Hm?
I don’t remember these.
You don’t remember anything though, right?
These in particular. I don’t recall ever even seeing things like these.
Hmm. I suppose. I guess you might have some faint recollection before the War’s end, for whatever reason you got put to sleep. Yeah, as you said, they’re machines. But we lost control of these too.
Like the Builders?
That’s right. Well, I make it sound as if they rebelled, but we had just made these, or at least things like these, a long time ago. Machinery for menial tasks, and all that. And eventually, in Edem’s new world, we no longer had any need for them. But they didn’t just disappear. They fell into disuse, scattered across the landscape, and we forgot about them, until one day they came back. They’re all just a pale shadow of what we had before, barely capable of the functions they were built for, but they’ve changed. And they continue to change, and grow, and spread. Like… wild animals.
She laughs. Well, not that I’d know what those are like. But I’ve read the records about the Old World, back when Gaia was still alive and kicking. Apparently, before we had just a hundred descendant species of humans, we had millions of species of others. They covered the entire surface of the planet, in every nook and cranny. The waters, the lands, the sky. And they lived outside the cities we built for ourselves, or sometimes inside them, aside us, or sometimes those cities crushed their homes and drove them out. Other things, not human, that we shared this earth with.
Well, they’ve all died by the time I came around, so I guess this is all just in theory.
Yes. I’d say they’re a lot like animals.
She looks shocked. You know what animals are like?
I remember them, yes.
Her face nearly lights up, in excitement or wonder or surprise or some amalgamation of the three. Hey, she says, jogging to my side and pulling my arm. She points to something perching on a beam. What’s that one like?
I suppose that resembles a bird.
And that one?
A dog, perhaps.
And what about that?
A… I frown, furrowing my brow. She points to a strange looking creature, now. Kind of like a crab, I suppose. Crossed with a… clam. And a tree.
It’s at this point I notice her staring, with a strange expression. I’m sorry, she says, laughing again. It was silly of me to ask. I just realized I don’t really know what any of those things are.
We walk along, watched on all sides by the strange machines. None approach us. They seem timid, almost scared of our presence.
They’re not hostile?
No. You saw Perun and Týr’s fight, did you not? Even if we may be the last beings left on this planet capable of dying, these machines know they cannot match us. It’d be like an ordinary human facing a god. See that one? she asks, pointing to the bird-like machine. Those things used to deliver supply packages, during the War. And that one? Simple attack drones to hunt down the seeds of Yggdrasil when they’d started to become a pest problem. And that… she frowns. Okay, I don’t know what that one was supposed to be.
And the Builders?
Well, that was kind of embarrassing of me. Usually they don’t pose much of a problem for us, but I didn’t want to bring the whole surface crashing down on our heads. She sighs. In my top form, I could’ve just blown the dumb thing up, no problem. Wouldn’t even have been able to touch me, if it weren’t for the buildings everywhere. Come to think of it, she says, finger on her lip, I’m not sure why it attacked you in the first place.
They fear us.
Do they? Who knows what a machine thinks. Maybe they do; maybe they can’t. I don’t know. But the doll seems to like you well enough.
She falls silent at this, looking at the doll. It had fallen asleep.
The sun sets by the time we reach the center of the basin, disappearing behind the plateau, the reds and pinks of the setting sky giving way to an inky black. Above us, a river of lights flows, blues and greens and whites all twinkling and blinking, as if forming an orbit about the earth. Some descend from the sky like falling stars.
I don’t remember those, either.
A laugh. You wouldn’t have, if you don’t remember anything after Edem’s call. Come on now, let’s get you a better view of the thing. She hops up onto a Builder’s severed leg, climbing up its body as the machines scuttle out of the way like animals taking flight.
The Builder itself resembles an enormous factory, and she walks along assembly lines, balances off derelict catwalks creaking with each step, climbs up the chimneys of blast furnaces— Don’t worry about it, I don’t think these are still active.
As we ascend its body I see more and more machines that hide as we approach, watching us just beyond where we can see, huddled together, unblinking, unmoving. They wait in the shadows, in abandoned shipping containers and holes in the walls, like dens, and the angel pays them no mind.
We reach the top of one of the Builder’s bodies, a large flat like a hangar with a caved-in roof, exposed to the heavens, the rusted remains of flight units lying scattered across the flats. The wind here is cold, stinging our skins, and the doll shifts on my back, mumbling or groaning something in slight discomfort, an expression almost as if grimacing. It blearily opens its eyes, and holds on tighter. Its body is cold.
Outside, a lone crane stands, towering above the landscape, its ropes swinging in the wind. The angel begins to climb up the mast, the beams creaking and swaying under the biting winds, and we make it to the very top. She balances on one of the beams on the arm, her own arms spread out like an acrobat walking across a tightrope, tiptoeing across to the very edge. I can’t hear it over the howling winds, but she throws her head back and laughs.
Nice view, yeah?
I stand up too, nearly losing my balance, and follow just behind her.
And in the sky, a thousand, a million lights shine, each rushing past the other, all a blur, all the more vivid beyond the tears in the sky, likes stars shooting into space or falling from the heavens, their shine reflected across the steel-gray surface, refracting among cracks and fissure and irregular formations of rusted and decaying colossi the size of cities, where faint pinpricks glow in the distance, the eyes of the machine in the dark, scattered across the wastes. Even among a colorless landscape, it paints it vivid, blues and red and pinks.
Nice view.
She grins. I know, right? You know, you’re probably the first in maybe a few centuries to care for this sorta thing— well, not like you’re dripping enthusiasm or anything. Most people’ve gotten bored. Won’t even blink at it all. Seen it every day, every night, until it’s become just another mundane thing. Same with the blood-cloud skies, or the crimson seas or the steel-gray earth. Like they’d forgotten what our old Earth was like.
Once upon a time, our sky was blue, and stars shined in the night. I’ve never seen it myself, but I know that world once existed. But you know what? I’ll never get tired of this view.
Peeking from beyond the blood-red clouds, there lies a crimson moon.
V.
By the next afternoon, we had left the basin, and arrived at the city.
Towers that stretch to the sky. A mammoth structure of steel and glass and light and stone. A living human city. How had they changed, these thousands of years?
They eat. They drink. They sleep. They wake. They love, they hate, they lust, they scorn, they get anxious, annoyed, excited, exasperated with work, bored over small-talk, riled up over petty, insignificant things that will disappear before the next day begins. They, in many ways, had not changed. Despite it all. Despite that they live, and die, and live again, in an endless cycle. A world where death had been robbed of its meaning.
I’d been living in this city for the past month, in that angel’s apartment.
This body of mine carries similar memories. Living in a human city, wandering about parks and commercial districts, for some reason or another, chasing after a human for motivations only that body could have understood. A vestigial thing that lends this experience some sort of familiarity. I live here, aimlessly, without purpose or meaning, as the angel sits on the bed trying and failing to teach the doll how to play guitar. The blind leading the blind, so it goes.
Why had I returned to this world?
To reclaim what belongs to me. So I tell myself. Yet here I am, lazing on the floor, listening to two amateurs work out one end of a guitar from the other.
I exit the apartment, heading out to the city. The angel waves back as I walk out the door.
Neither the sky nor the earth can be seen from here. The city is built in tiers, streets and transit lines criss-crossing the other, above and below, a chaotic, jumbled web of steel, interspersed with billboards and flashing screens, neon lights and constant sound, a city of unending, sleepless night. I disappear into the crowd.
Humans may have stayed the same in some ways, but in others, they quite clearly changed. Their appearances, for one. A side-effect of their mechanisms developed to adapt with a hostile world. I had watched as it happened, as they changed themselves, though it’s another thing to see it up close. Figures with wings, or claws, or exoskeletons, or inhumanly metallic or crystalline bodies, mechanical parts integrated into their frames, all strange and alien but remarkably human, how they hold themselves, or how they move or speak or act— I don’t know. Some element of humanity remaining in their appearance I couldn’t pin down. Even the ones that resemble little more than amorphous blobs of gas. Funnily enough, of everything that lives in this city, my appearance must look the most human of them all.
Despite it all, something else too had changed.
They live forever now. Every man and woman in this crowd, every other I pass, I see, I hear, has been alive for a thousand years, maybe more. Since the end of the War. Everything they could possibly hope to do, every sight left to see, every activity, every interest, every experience— everything they could experience, they have done so already. Given how long Man had been chasing immortality, I’m almost curious as to how they attained it. And given that they now attained such a thing, I’m more curious if they understand, now, what it means to be immortal.
I remember the angel’s words. That this immortality was not their choice. That they could answer Edem’s call, and return to a life in fear of death. An absurd proposal. The humanity I remembered would never have taken such a choice.
And yet…
I look up to a flashing screen on a building up above, two figures clashing over an abandoned city, one black, one white. The last thing humanity lived for.
The continuation of the War.
It had never been very clear to me before why humans existed, or decided to exist, or decided thus to continue their existence. I never thought about it too hard, other than the times I found them immensely irritating. They, too, seemed to struggle with such a question, and had sought an answer in anything they could get their hands on. Love. Fear. God. The perpetuation of their blood. The accumulation of wealth. The extermination of their enemies. The search for the Truth of the world.
War, on the other hand, had long been a side-effect of such a struggle. The hated means to the end. For Man once warred to protect their own existence, against others that would threaten it, against Gods or other men.
In War they found their answer— or, an answer.
The means became the end. The only end. War, once a desperate struggle, has been reduced to a game, a game in which every remaining human has a stake. Prospectors, investors, armorers, all in part spectator in part participant to the spectacle that is the War. Monitoring market values, signing contracts, war has become a commercialized thing.
Nominally they were contractors, hired out to builders or businesses scattered about this stellar system, on-world or off-world to protect their interests, securing and competing for mining sites, for Grain or metals or whatever other resources they could hack off this dead rock. Businesses compete, interests conflict— just like the Old World. And agents of violence were needed to secure those interests.
Knight against Knight. The only mortal things left in this world. What they lost in mortality, they gained in power.
A Warrist’s market value is determined by their victories. As some emerged victorious over others, time and time again, they became ranked in terms of their market value. This ranking itself became the game. All eyes on the Warrists, as they fought and fought again, to rise to the top. And they soon began to invest in weaponry and armor and the engineering of each Warrist, to create the ultimate victor of this game— for what end?
To be the Number One.
Overall, I’d say, humans remained very much the same.
I watch the fight projected on the screen, watch clashing steel bodies amid storms of fire and lightning. A replay of the fight from before, though I had only seen the tail end of it from afar. Now, a closer view. Their bodies resemble armored machines, like the flight units we found abandoned in the basin, soaring through a blood-red sky, firing upon each other with linear cannons, vaporizing and glassing the landscape, striking up storms with each swing of their blades. As I had remembered them. I listen to the commentary of other bystanders, watching the fight projected on the screen.
—So what’s this make, now. Perun’s taken down Rank Twelve? Rose maybe ten, twenty spots in market values. Speculators going ballistic. You see that shit, where he starts just fucking chucking the skyscrapers at him—
—How many Deathless does this make in the top twenty, now—
—Over half, at this point. Told you they’re good. Statistics don’t lie. In the game of War, Deathless reign supreme—
—You’d think that Warrists who’ve died before would be better at this sort of thing. More experienced. The Deathless fear death. It makes them irrational—
—That’s the point, yeah? Irrationality, doing the unexpected. It’s ‘cause of that shit they win. Hell, even the number one, Belus, is a Deathless like him, yeah?
And the other humans had been watching. Speculating on the odds, moving about the flow of money and sponsorships, buying and bidding for future contracts, playing about the future market of war. For the sake of the stakes in these battles— the death and ultimate end of their enemy— such became the ultimate meaning around which human existence revolved.
I enter a lift, taking me down the city, a view that overlooks a steel-grey landscape, jumbled steel and cracked stone. And I wander. I still don’t know why. The answer to me seems as distant as the sun hidden beyond the sea of clouds, even moreso than before.
But I need to know— what had happened to this world, after its death?
Beneath the city, I arrive at an empty facility. Rows upon rows of computer systems circularly arranged in rings, gently humming and blinking in the dark, like pillars that stretch to an invisible ceiling. A facility for archival purposes. It’s immaculately clean and well-kept, though without a single presence, human or machine, throughout the entire thing.
Within the center of the circle is a lone terminal, a podium mounted with a screen. It activates on my approach.
A youthful voice greets me, coming from the terminal. Good afternoon, stranger.
I bring up a catalogue of its archives, and skim most of it. Seventeen million and a half sequenced genomes, preserved from Old World species before their extinction. Activity logs of Builder-class machines, and timeline maps of the transformed and then-destroyed territories. Analyses of material salvaged from the alien lifeforms of the TYPEs. Records of research projects, regarding the terraforming and space exploration, whose progress seems to have steadily waned until coming to a standstill approximately eight hundred years ago. Of these, only one appears of any interest to me.
Gaian Terminal Restoration Project.
I read into its history. This facility was once a research facility dedicated to the study of the Old Earth, and its preservation and restoration. Interest and funds waned over time, as such a prospect came to seem further and further out of reach, until it disbanded completely. This grave of a data center still stands today, repurposed partially for archival purposes, but mostly to support the city’s network.
In other words, nothing I really understand.
Are you in need of any assistance?
The terminal speaks at me. An image like that of an eye projects from the screen.
And you are?
I am Adam. The overseer artificial intelligence that maintains this facility. It is not often we get any visitors.
I frown. So you’re a machine?
In a sense. In that a machine is a body, but what I am is a mind. Though, I suppose, such a difference is not much of an important one in this context.
I nod absently, and continue to pull up files. Words I don’t understand too well pop out at me. Planetary Terminal. Lunar Migration. Weltseele. I frown.
Tell me about this project.
Begin playback.
Before the descent of the Aristoteles, humans had further advanced their capacity for space exploration, in part of a program to develop weaponry in their conflict against the A-RAYs. As they experienced steadily increasing losses in said conflict, the Moon had been considered as a possible refuge for the Liner subspecies should they lose, and methods were researched to make such a habitat inhabitable. In Common Year 2798 it had been discovered that the Moon, too, possessed a weltseele— the soul of a world— similar in nature to Gaia, which had begun to deteriorate 823 years prior Common Year 1975, until its true death 621 years prior Common Year 2177.
The weltseele discovered on the Moon, however, was incomplete in its nature and dormant, and became the object of human study, which developed into the Lunar Terminal Development Project. In Common Year 2809, the project eventually replicated said soul, and contained it within a silicon vessel. Through interfacing with this machine, they discovered they could manipulate the lunar surface: creating seas and water, or encasing the atmosphere in ice, or shaping the landscape to their will.
Now provided a means to survive on the lunar surface, the committee behind the Project began to enact a plan to migrate the rest of the unaltered humans to the surface of the Moon in order to escape annihilation. However, before the migration could be completed, the Aristoteles descended to Earth, and all contact with off-world sites had been lost. Thus the Project had been disbanded.
In Common Year 3012, all Aristoteles threatening the Gaian atmosphere had been eliminated, the remaining one hundred subspecies were merged into one, and space exploration resumed. A lunar colony was no longer needed, as the human subspecies were no longer in conflict and under threat of extinction. Priorities were focused on research effort, and the scientific community developed a hypothesis: that the Aristoteles that invaded the Gaian atmosphere were intimately linked to other hypothetical worldsouls, and that the dormant soul found on the moon could be used to reverse engineer such an Aristoteles.
Such a hypothesis had been contested, however, as no corresponding Aristoteles had been discovered for the only two observed weltseelen. While there were fears that the hypothetical last surviving Aristoteles— the TYPE-MOON— would one day reveal itself as the others had done, such a day never came.
Regardless, the proposal of such a link spurred an effort to further develop their Planetary Terminals, reverse engineering from the data and alien material gathered from the Aristoteles’ corpses, and utilizing the data gathered during the development of the Lunar Terminal for the creation of a similar replacement for the Gaian weltseele. This became the Gaian Terminal Restoration Project.
End playback.
It falls silent, and I stare at it, expecting it to say more, as the image lazily rotates floating above the screen. The humans have a word for this sort of feeling. Impatience, they call it. It says nothing, apparently content with its silence.
And?
Does this user have another query?
What happened to the project?
A long silence.
Would you like to see?
VI.
Beyond the server room, there lies a lift, a large open platform carried by a belt, set in a vast tunnel that leads deep underground, into a space that opens up like a large cavern like a manufacturing facility— storage towers like pillars stretching to the heavens, intricate webs of pipelines and transport lines, dried-up pools and fluid tanks, all rusting and wasting away from age and neglect. Compared to the server rooms up above, this structure seems a lot less maintained, strewn with rubble, abandoned for perhaps hundreds of years.
I walk along the catwalk that runs between the towers, that hangs above vast empty pools stretching on beyond what I can see, the overseer intelligence illuminating the way light by light, guiding me to our destination.
At the end of the room, it leads to a corridor, a claustrophobic and dark and winding thing, progressingly greater states of disrepair. It opens up into a vast room stretching on so far that the other walls cannot be seen, cast in a faint bluish glow from what light filters in far above, plain and featureless save for one thing.
The floor is strewn with broken dolls.
Pale golden hair. Deep red eyes. Bodies like that of a child. They lie, crumpled and discarded and scattered across the room, some missing limbs, or halves of their body, upper or lower, internal wiring lying exposed and rusting away. And in the room’s center, bodies and spare things like arms or heads are gathered, forming a pile around a pillar, a stasis tank with its glass face smashed in and its piping broken, spare cables left hanging, strewn across the floor.
And on the very top of that pile sits a figure, the form of a young man, short colorless hair and piercing red eyes and nude body covered in strange marks, sitting with a knee propped up resting his arm on it, holding what looks to be an apple in his hand. On his chest and all across his arm, through broken skin, circuitry and steel sinews lie exposed.
And it smiles.
Hello, Stranger.
Originally Posted by Dullahan
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