Work Text:
She wakes, unknowing.
Adrift on a bed of shallow sunlit waters, ripples of sun and ripples of sand mingling beneath her. If she cared to look, she would see distant pyramids in the clear blue sky, like those of ancient Egypt but inverted, some shedding metal scales. She does not look, though the pyramids tug at her neurons. She senses she should remember them. She does not.
Orienting her sensory receptors, she slips gracefully beneath the waves with a flick of her fins. She follows a mottled green grouper through a hole in the cliff face before her. The fish is her herald into a kingdom of life and light.
888
She wanders, entranced.
Drifting through an underwater forest drenched in green sunlight, towering strands of kelp reaching for the sky. All around her is a boundless profusion of color, life, and drama. It is as if a rainbow has plunged through the water's surface and there given birth to creatures of every shape and hue. Lionfish flex their porcupine spines, starfish comb stolidly through the sand, bright blue tangs dance and court, the grouper who brought her here snaps up smaller swimmers. All play their role in a lossless, unending exchange of energy. All is in balance, down to the pink and blue coral polyps sifting unseen nutrients from the current.
Further on, she finds her way blocked by a coral gate. It appears as sturdy as any metal, but one of her little yellow drones makes short work of it. If she cared to think about it, she might have felt a twinge of guilt upon seeing nature's architecture crumble to dust in the space of seconds when it has stood for untold years. She does not.
A ripple amongst the fronds of the forest beyond. Something large and pale and sleek parts the curtain of vegetation, then vanishes again into green obscurity. It sends a ripple through her: not fear (she can't feel fear), but caution, heightened awareness.
Beyond is a desert and an oasis: sandy gray dust, the bones of withered kelp, and in its midst, a glowing blue pool – of the ocean and yet apart from it, water within water. An impulse rises within her, as if a string lies between that pool and her chest, and she is being drawn along its invisible length. It's a simple thought, deceptively so: There should be life here. She does not ask why there isn't.
Diving into the pool, she finds herself surrounded by deep blue, more like the night sky than the ocean depths. The feathery outlines of distant architectures – the walls and spires of a temple complex – branch out around her. Ahead, traced out in rippling light, is a path to the altar. She swims to it, still drawn by instinct.
Her hand goes to her chest, unbidden, and from it she withdraws a small blue sphere that wobbles like a jellyfish. She is undisturbed by this gesture, though she does not understand it. Nor does she feel in any way diminished as the seas around her absorb her offering. On the contrary, as the coral pillar in the center of these barrens flushes pink and creatures burst from its base in wild, joyous abundance, she feels as though something empty inside of her has begun to fill.
She would love to linger in these sparkling waters, glide with a manta ray amidst their diamond brightness. But she feels herself drawn on, and she must go.
She does not ask why.
888
She advances, curious.
Before her, an expanse of deep water, brooded over by an inverted pyramid. It has metal scales, like some massive armored fish or reptile. Her little triangular drone fits perfectly into the lock on this great door.
For some unknowable reason, her sensors detect more menace from that pyramid than from the deep, gloomy expanse of water below.
888
She races, flying.
Swept into a fast-moving current alongside an honor guard of dolphins and fish of every color. She spirals through their schools with an abandon she does not fully understand, and her body and theirs resonate with the same golden energy. For a brief moment, their souls are in communion.
Soul? What an odd thought for a machine.
She darts out of a cliffside tunnel into another desert, makes her offering at the altar. Watches as life and color flood back into the region in the form of rays, dolphins, turtles, sea slugs, bait fish, predatory fish, pink and red corals.
Her drone has to cut down another coral gate with its spinning razor-teeth so that she can progress. Beyond, in the deep gulf between her and the next pyramid, a shark comes suddenly roaring up from the abyss to crush her drone to bits. This is her interloper, then, the sleek form she saw vanish in the kelp forest.
If she cared to think about it, she might find justification in the shark's anger towards her drone, the despoiler of nature's sanctuary. She does not.
She thinks only that she still has another drone to unlock the pyramid's door.
888
She explores, wondering.
A temple, all tiled in lapis lazuli and smoothed to gleaming by the currents. The walls are adorned with mosaics: human figures emptying slender-necked vessels of glowing blue liquid into the sea, the same color as her offerings to the altars. They keep only some of it for themselves, to infuse into their growing cities.
Among them is a taller figure, clad in a dark blue diving suit with yellow flippers and helmet. Inverted triangle on the chest. It draws up the blue glow from the water.
Has she been here before? She has no memory of this place, and yet it seems to be imprinted on her very essence (whatever that may be). A predecessor, then? An earlier model?
If she cared to think about it, she would have noticed that in the mosaics in which her likeness appears, the people do not return the blue liquid to the sea.
888
She investigates, questioning.
Wandering between the pillars and statuary and crumbled blocks of masonry, a forest of stone to match the forest of kelp. There was a city here, in these waters turned orange by the sunset above. Flooding, or an aquatic people? The same ones depicted in the temple of lapis? If they were ever here, they are gone now, but their legacy is not. They seemed to have held sharks in reverence, for the creature's likeness is everywhere immortalized in stone.
Their mechanisms remain, too. She follows an elegant eagle ray to a cavern, where she turns a crank that has not moved in ages. It resists at first, but then the creak and clank of heavy chains rings through the water, and a gate lifts at the other end of the city.
The currents turn gold in the sunset. The sleek fish and stately rays and good-natured dugongs are gilded as they pass through the doorway. She follows on to the next altar and the next pyramid, trailing life in her wake. She understands that her offerings are somehow restoring vitality to the sea, but it doesn't seem to be taking anything from her. Indeed, she feels fuller and fuller every time. If there is anything like a heart in her mechanical body, it is swelling with rightness.
888
She marvels, uncomprehending.
Another blue-tiled temple, but this time her likeness is towering, a benevolent god come to bless the people, her instrument the inverted pyramid hovering in her palm.
On the opposite wall, just as large, is the white shark that destroyed her drone. In the center of its body is a bright blue sphere like what she has been offering from her own chest. Soul?
No (not that word again), not soul. Some sort of power. A power she, or other Divers, took from the ocean and gave to the vanished people whose art and architecture bespeak such prosperity.
If they were so blessed, why have they disappeared?
What had she to do with it, if anything? She does not care to think about it.
888
She descends, accompanied.
An escort of blue whales, plunging with her into the depths, each one a living fortress. A great eye rolls down to regard her with depthless age and intelligence. She is tiny beside the ancient giant, contrary to the mosaic in the temple, yet she is content to be so.
She is so taken by the majesty of the whales that she hardly notices when they abandon her at the bottom of the ocean.
No, not abandoned, she quickly realizes – fled.
This is a graveyard.
The monolithic bones of a deceased whale still hold the shape of the creature they once were. Thermal vents bubble hellishly, spouting black smoke. More hellish still are the thick cables snaking between them. They pulse with their own sort of life, but it is false, artificial, crackling and lethal.
She is like those cables.
She doesn't want to think about that, but she fears she soon must.
Led by blind fish who never needed eyes in this darkness and yet see more clearly than she, she turns a crank to allow the cables their full share of electricity and open the way out.
She does not think about the little pyramids half-buried in the sand. They crackle feebly, as if at any moment they might spring back into deadly animation.
888
She descends, alone.
Space and depth lose their meaning in this inky midnight. She senses rather than sees the empty rift yawning around her as she swims down ever further. Her solitude is complete until, rising like a ghost, comes a giant squid – no, a kraken of legend (her programming balks at the irrationality, but it can only be true!), tentacles shimmering with hunting colors, each eye a black void in a blacker sea.
She lightly grasps a fin. The squid leads her to the next barren region.
She makes her offering. The creatures reborn here are strange, pale, blind things, some with lights of their own making, but it's all right. This is their appointed place.
It comforts her for a little while.
888
She is consumed, trembling.
Another pyramid, but larger than the rest. Inside, things that should not be.
Unnatural red light. Creatures of electricity and mechanism, facsimiles of life. Assembly lines, endlessly active. Little pyramids – mines – around every corner.
A holographic display: a drone, a pyramid, a Diver. All bearing a core of blue life-force.
She doesn't want to think about it, but oh, she must think about it now. This is why – she is why, or her creators at least – parts of the ocean are barren. She is a thief, a despoiler, stealing life from the seas, sacrificing it to this lurid red factory so that more thieves can be made and steal more life. On and on in an unending, self-sustaining cycle. Unlike the grouper catching its prey on the surface, this exchange has no balance. The grouper will one day return its energy to the sea, but here, there is loss. The scales of wise nature have not been consulted. Is that why the people whose cities she has passed through have vanished? Did she help them take too much and return too little? Is this factory the unthinking, unchecked remnant of that process, or does it still serve something higher with its stolen energy?
And why did she not remember until now? She must have malfunctioned in the course of her duties. She blesses that amnesia, the hard restart that allowed her to see her terrible purpose clearly, though her rejection comes too late.
She doesn't know if a machine is capable of atonement, but she feels compelled to try. If nothing else, her eyes are open.
A vast room opens before her: a new forest, not of towering kelp or reverent stone, but of weaponry. Every leaf a mine, another perversion of life. And ahead, another pyramid, its central shaft a lidless eye. This must be the central processing unit of this complex.
For a moment, she can't believe this room is real. The thought of trying to cross it is absurd. But she must.
She shrugs off the electric bite of the first mine she swims into, but it sets her artificial nerves jangling and makes her sloppy. More collisions, a chain reaction, one jolt hurtling her into the next like a rag doll caught in a lightning storm. Her diving suit melts away, leaving her metal skeleton exposed. It hurts. She has never known pain before, but she supposes with an odd clarity that pain, too, is part of life.
Suddenly, she is afraid. Do I have a soul? What happens to me if I die without a soul? Will there be anything of me left?
The pyramid looms before her, mother of chaos, silo of captive energy. There are no more mines now, but she is so weak.
A flash of white against blood-red. She sees, with dimming sensors, the shark throwing itself into the pyramid's open doorway, heedless of electrocution, teeth striving against metal. She finds herself hoping her former adversary succeeds in its last attempt to protect the ocean.
But it is not to be: the pyramid looses a brutal shock wave that jolts the shark loose. The electricity floods her fraying nerves, and the overstimulating pulse is too much. She is hammered into darkness.
888
She wakes, dazed.
A shallow, sandy-floored cavern, no longer red but the blue-green of life.
She lifts her skeletal metal body and goes to the shark's side, puts a hand on its rough hide in what she hopes is a comforting gesture as its eyes roll over white.
It is not in her programming to pray. Even so, she promises to honor this guardian's last sacrifice. She will see this duty done.
888
She seeks, awestruck.
Green seas again, but a different green than the kelp forests. An ancient green, the green of primitive plants and moss-covered stones. These seas are old, very old. All around her are species that have not swum the waters of Earth for ages, fossils miraculously reborn. Armored trilobites scuttle over the sand, groups of Arandaspis arrow through the water like oversized tadpoles. An Elasmosaurus, inky blue-black on top and ivory beneath, glides silently past her. For all its long-necked bulk, the creature seems weightless, ethereal, scarcely stirring a fin.
She follows it through a labyrinth of tumbled pillars. Although ancient life has persisted in this place, its people are still nowhere to be seen.
Surfacing, she pulls herself up on a lapis lazuli walkway. She winces a bit at the sight of her bare metal arms – so wrong they look in this place! – but she quickly forgets her troubles as she takes in the vista before her. This was a city – the towers and gates stretch on endlessly – but though its people are gone, nature has not left it bereft. The tiled towers have become cliffs for waterfalls to pour over, the gates trellises for climbing plants, the waters a peaceful surface for lilies and their attendant frogs. Everywhere there are sounds: birds, frogs, insects, skittering lizards. This place sings.
Her quest to lift the gate to the next room takes her to the highest tower, winding up blue walkways. When she has turned the crank and freed the heavy chain to lift its burden, she lingers at the edge for a moment. She takes in the warm humid air through her olfactory receptors. It smells of wet and salt and life. Then, abandoning herself to the nascent emotions inside her, she bends her ankles and leaps. She arches gracefully down, hands out like an arrowhead in front of her. For a moment, she is like an arcing spray of water herself.
888
She flies, rejoicing.
Through the gate and into a jetstream, but this is not like the first, back in the coral seas. This current passes through the ages.
Ancient creatures surround her as she flies down corridors of time, spiraling through amber-lit passages with ornate latticed windows, then bursting out into the heart of the old city, buildings terracing away to the edge of perception, blue lapis and crushed white shells for walls and roofs, all the windows briefly, miraculously lit.
Her clockwork heart races as she realizes her body is healing. Her diving suit melds back around her metal skeleton, but white-gold this time. In place of the inverted pyramid on her chest is a nautilus shell. She has rejected her former mark, sigil of exploitation. Whether it was she who did this to the ocean, or her fellow machines, or something beyond her entirely, it matters not. She is here now, and she is making it right.
Her shark is streaming along below her, glowing golden. It was never really dead, she realizes, because it isn't really a shark at all, but the voice, the avatar of the seas and the precious life-force therein.
She clasps a dorsal fin, and together they smash through the chains cruelly binding more of the sunken pyramids to the ocean floor. The metal structures are quickly overtaken by algae and corals, and about these new nurseries abundant life surges into being, singing in myriad voices. What were once loci of destruction are now cradles of rebirth.
Then they are back in the horrible red minefield, but they have no fear now. Their minds are one, vital energy flowing seamlessly between them. They are become as gods. This is their apotheosis.
The mines burst harmlessly before them, one after another in a cascade of brilliant white, then the central pyramid disintegrates as if it were sand. She is laughing, a fierce rush of righteous vengeance.
Out into polar seas, breaching towards the moon with the blue whales. Sea and sky meld seamlessly. She could fall from one right into the other: all the world is an ocean. Looking down on penguins on their ice floes, hearing their distant chatter.
One more pyramid ahead, one last prison to liberate, and then…
888
She drifts, watching.
An undersea garden, she and her spirit companion side by side. Ripples of sun and ripples of sand mingle beneath them. A new habitat is emerging on and around this region's pyramid as coral polyps eagerly adopt the metal plates as their substrate.
She is so proud of such resilience.
She is and has always been a machine, yet on her journey she learned to live. Now she will watch over the seas and the pyramid-nurseries, bridging the gap between machine and life. Her companion the shark, the spirit of the ocean, will help her.
She does not know if this mysterious creature chose her to save the seas, and in doing so wiped her mind of her former purpose, or if it was a simple malfunction of her central processor. Either way, she is glad. She will no longer steal and exploit, but work to ensure a careful balance. Fortunately for her, nature, unimpeded, tends to balance itself quite well.
And now she knows why the blue substance she offered at every altar made her feel more complete, more alive, with every giving. That substance, the life of the ocean distilled, was never meant to be hoarded away in Diver, drone, and pyramid. It was ever and always meant to be shared.
So she shares. She shares and she heals, both herself and her domain.
And she loves.