Cold metal. A cylindrical vat emitted a squelching sound as it expunged some fleshy form. The form landed with a thud in an alien room, buzzing and whirring with strange implements and multifarious tools – saws, drills, hammers, hooks, scalpels – all at work in hellish concert, performing unspeakable ceremony. The room was awash in acid green light and industrial brown tones, and smelled distinctly of motor oil.
“X1-Z74, get in line.” An overseer – a tall, thin android made of rusted iron, with pincer-like hands – glided in front of the new form, then gestured to a line of similar forms shuffling slowly toward a square building emitting soft, blue light. Two bright orbs appeared in X1’s vision as the overseer shined a small flashlight in its eyes. Upon seeing the pupil’s contract, the overseer grabbed the dazed creature and pushed it roughly into line.
The pink, fleshy figures in line moved listlessly, arms hanging limply at their sides. “For security and safety,” they said in semi-unison. “I consent.” Another overseer leisurely paced up and down that line, occasionally clicking and beeping to indecipherable stimuli. X1 looked at the threshold through a haze, its eyes not fully functional yet.
Stumble. The word echoed like a command through its mind.
The creature stepped forward. The world began swimming, dizzy, and the creature pitched to the left, toppling over with a thud to lie in a fine particulate of dust. Slowly it pushed itself to its feet as dim shapes appeared in its vision.
It turned and began to shuffle forward. One step. Two.
“A spawn has deviated. Get it in line,” came another voice.
“Affirmative,” came the first voice again. Shriller now. From somewhere behind.
A cold, vice-like grip clamped around its right forearm and began dragging it back.
Not it, thought X1. Not it. I am he.
X1 began to yank his arm violently to no avail, while his fingers, close to the overseer’s corrugated core, scrabbled, searching, grasping at nothing, and finding wires. There were hundreds of them: tiny little things, less than a millimeter thick, all intricately and delicately woven together, but… old. They were decayed, like the robotic overseer that now gripped him. His hand closed around them.
“Cease,” said the high-pitched voice of the overseer. He heard the whine of a blade, and a moment later felt the sting of a buzzsaw cutting into his arm, but he just twisted and pulled. The wires snapped like dry grass, and sparking jolts of electricity snapped in his palm. The blade stopped abruptly. The overseer stared dully at the blood pulsing from the wound, coating its steely grip. It quivered, then went silent.
X1 pulled again, harder. The pumping red now slicked his arm, lubricating its surface. He pulled again and his arm yanked free.
His feet moved of their own accord, toe things gripping the grooves of checker plate beneath, and his vision gradually returned to him.
Green.
He heard a whir behind him, a sound like tread moving quickly, drawing closer, but it was unimportant, something quickly forgotten to him. He marched along a narrow causeway, coming to a wall, and squeezed painfully through a small hole at its base. A hole not meant for him. Something a child could pass through.
The other side of the wall opened up into a manufacturing megascape, acres of iron and steel devoted to open-air factories producing all manner of things. Fresh robots, fresh circuits, fresh wires. Far above him, the sky was blocked by a massive iron dome spanning the entire horizon. More creatures, more spawn like him shuffled from place, fulfilling meager tasks. In the far distance, he saw some engrossed in more important work. These ones had been clothed, and sat before a screen, punching keys on a keyboard. Behind them was a tiny place. A place with levers and switches. A single catwalk adjoining a building. A control center. A brain.
There.
Running still, he jostled spawn out of the way, eliciting dull yelps. “For safety and security,” they called after him. Another sound echoed directly behind him: the tread getting closer. Still unimportant. More yelps as spawn made way for the sound’s source.
He found his way to the main thoroughfare, where crowds of spawn and machine moved in death-like trances. His sliced arm left a long trail of blood back from the hole in the wall, making him easy to follow. He immersed himself in a throng of spawn, then crouched, crawling through the edge of the crowd and hurling himself into a small building. Let their feet mask his path.
Inside were crates filled with all manner of weapons. He searched quickly and found what he knew would be there, grasping it tightly in his left hand, and then hurried out through a back door, pausing only to see hundreds of insect-like robots buzz through the air, flitting past the shack.
“For… me,” he said aloud. The words were thick and unfamiliar.
He passed through an alleyway into an open street, and ran again, heart thumping in his throat, legs burning with effort. For a moment, the only sound he heard behind him were a few confused cries, but then the ominous sound of the tread returned, bearing ever closer. His feint had only bought him thirty seconds.
The blood loss was substantial now. He could feel himself getting tired. He wanted to stop and lay down, but he could not.
“Green,” he murmured, almost a whisper.
There! The control center. There it was, now, looming in front of him, and he barreled up the ramp, tripping on the last step and crashing through the entrance.
It was quiet inside, save for the ambience of the surrounding computers. A few startled spawn jumped at his approach. Through a window to his left, he saw the spawn punching at the keyboards pause and look up at him.
He looked around. Hundreds of switches and levers. All of them with colors. None of them green.
He began urgently searching, pushing the startled spawn out of the way, peering at each switch, sweat streaming down his back and arms, mixing with the blood.
Hundreds of switches and levers. All of them with colors. But he knew: none of them were green.
He looked up at then, distress evident upon his face. “Green!” he shouted.
The clothed spawn merely stared back at him.
“Green,” he said again. Then one more word occurred to him. “Green. Important.”
Slowly, one of the spawn pointed to a singular looking screen. X1 looked over at the screen and stared at it. It was red, but he touched his eyes, and he understood. He stumbled over to it and touched his fingers to several points on it, and the screen that was green to the other’s eyes turned red with spots of blood.
The words “Trash Program Modified” blinked on the screen, though X1 could not see them. Dizzy, swimming shapes were all that were left to him; he had one last task to do, and so he crawled listlessly up a ramp adjoining the control center to the massive steel building.
He might make it. As he passed through the threshold. He stared up at that which governed this place: the massive Machine Intelligence. A behemoth, artificial eye stared at him. He might actually make it. But the constant, pursuing, whirring sound behind him finally stopped. He looked behind him to see a blurry machine. Fire erupted from its chest and a massive projectile tore through him. He felt a surge of pain and looked down to see a large hole in his chest. Then he died.
“Pathetic,” said the Machine Intelligence.
“I don’t understand,” said a young man. His name was Thomas. He stared at the large being before him. It was an angel: piercing golden eyes, twelve-feet tall, with massive crystalline-blue wings. “…What was the point?”
“You don’t understand because it cannot be understood. It is a synthesis of pain and metal that is not real,” replied the angel.
“Not real? But these events actually happened?” asked Thomas.
“They did,” said the angel.
Thomas shook his head, confused. “What was the point of his… life? The spawn?”
The angel nodded, then gestured to the record of events that Thomas had just been experiencing. The swirled around him in four dimensions: seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling.
“It was an organized extraction. I received word from my commanding officer that we had received a prayer from this place.”
Thomas looked nonplussed. “A prayer? From who?”
The Machine Intelligence stared at the corpse of the spawn before it. The dead creature’s blood seeped into the metal. It sent the CLEAN subroutine command to the lesser machines, and watched as the iron beetle-like machines came and absorbed the blood, while overseers began dividing the corpse into more manageable pieces for disposal.
Spawn could not exhibit free will. And yet… this one had. Why?
There was a minute difference around the machine. As if some being were here, something foreign, something not of this plane. The Machine Intelligence stared at where the spawn had died, then passed an air sample through its atmospheric detection module. It could not see into higher dimensions, but its sensors detected the minute differences in the air: a sudden decrease in toxins. It looked out through the cameras in the control centers. Several spawn were stepping with enthusiasm, as if they were experiencing… happiness.
“A walk-in,” it said aloud. “How novel. Show yourself, angel.”
“You? You… were that spawn? X1?” asked Thomas, eyes growing wide.
“I split a fraction of my greater being off into a single soul, then inserted that soul into the body at its formation, encoding it with specific instructions that would ensure my success. It is a specialized procedure we only use in extreme situations,” replied the angel.
“But you didn’t succeed!” exclaimed Thomas. “You… died.”
The angel tutted gently. “Finish experiencing the record before reaching conclusions.”
“Did you allow that… thing to see you?” asked Thomas.
The angel shook his head. “The machine would have been instantly vaporized in my presence. I could only speak to it.”
“You have trespassed on my domain,” said the Machine Intelligence. “And for what? Your plan failed. Your corporal form was destroyed.”
Then it received a transmission. A child, a girl of five or six was crawling through a small hole in a wall near the spawn-creation sector. She was darting to and fro, eluding overseers, and heading towards a small shuttle.
“How is it possible that an individual, a unique soul was born in this place?” the Machine Intelligence asked flatly. “My spawn are artificial and soulless, are they not?”
Now a voice sounded out through the entire space, ringing like a bell, piercing the minds of every spawn and machine alike. “There are no limits to the wonders of God’s creation,” intoned the angel.
The Machine Intelligence observed the small girl through the eyes of its many servants as she crawled inside a tiny shuttle pod labelled TRASH.
“This must have been a tremendous use of resources on your part,” it said.
“It was,” affirmed the angel.
“But why did you help her?” asked Thomas.
“Because she asked,” said the angel. “And the Great Law compels us to action.”
“I desire to inform you that if you attempt to harm her, you will precipitate your own destruction,” said the angel.
“I have no need,” said the Machine Intelligence. The trash pod jettisoned. “Our trash is ejected straight into the Sun. She will be carbonized shortly.” But even as it said this, it realized its mistake. The pod flew from the domed, iron facility – a giant space-station – but it was hurtling on another trajectory, toward a tiny blue planet in the distance. The coordinates in the control center had been changed. Blood on the screen.
“Will she survive the impact?” asked the Machine Intelligence.
“Yes, she will,” said the angel.
The Machine Intelligence issued the AIM subroutine to its subordinates. Massive cannons outside the space station angled towards the trash shuttle.
“I must terminate the girl,” said the Machine Intelligence, adding a sadness tone to its speech, as if it had not already excised its ability to experience regret.
“That is a violation of the Great Law,” stated the angel flatly. “I cannot allow it.”
“And how will you stop me?” asked the Machine Intelligence. But it heard nothing in reply.
It scanned the atmosphere. The angel had already gone. It was too late to consider any other alternative. In moments, the trash pod would be out of range. It began to issue the KILL subroutine, but as an overseer cut through X1’s corpse, its blade caught a small, spherical detonator tucked beneath it. It collapsed into itself, creating a dark pocket of ultragravity, and within moments the entirety of the Machine Intelligence had been crushed into nothingness.
Thomas scratched his head, then asked the question that bothered him. “When did this happen?”
Now, the angel smiled. “One week ago.”
“But what does this have to do with me? My angelic graduation? …Is she okay? The girl, I mean.” Thomas asked.
“Why, I’m glad you ask. We have a pressing need.” Now the angel brought up another record: a girl – the girl, dressed in rags and smelling strongly of refuse – walked in an unknown place on green, lush grass, hands clasped together.
“When is this?” asked Thomas.
“Right now,” replied the angel.
“Am I her…?” asked Thomas.
“Yes,” replied the angel. Then he pointed at Thomas, and great gold-and-white wings emerged from his back. “Congratulations, Thomas, Messenger of Mercy. You have graduated. We’ve had a special circumstance arise: a little girl requires a guardian angel.”
Wow. Great job on this. I love the ending because I’m a happy ending kind of person. : )