The Last Human IV - Chapter 28 - Made for the Makers (Patreon)

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The Ark was separated into four parts, nested inside each other: the outer hull wrapped around the internal systems, like life support and engines and energy distribution. Inside that, a great hollow cavern stretched for miles down the length of the Ark—a city inside a ship. Or, at least, the skeleton of a city.

Nestled between the rolling hills and streams of crystal-blue water (each fabricated by Khadam’s own hand), steel columns and unfinished floors sprouted toward the cavernous ceiling, far above. Scaffolding and curving structures littered the horizon, where Khadam had set up the first foundations of this pristine, new city. Parks and gardens and fountain plazas filled the gaps between the forest of half-built bones, though the parks only showed the first signs of plan tlife—juvenile trees and starter grasses and flowers that wouldn’t bloom for months.

And buried deep beneath the habitation quarters, through a maze of corridors and service tunnels and logistics chambers—in the most protected center of the Ark—there was the Bridge.

The Bridge was a half-sphere, dominated by a raised platform at its center, which was ringed by over a hundred separate command desks, each littered with obscure devices, labeled with even more obscure words. The walls were covered by flat panels, most of them dark. A few that were on displayed an identical error screen. “UNAUTHORIZED USER” blinked in angry, capital letters.

Redenite tinkers and cyran engineers worked furiously at the command desks, grumbling and shouting at the avian guards to please, get out of the way. It wouldn’t have made a difference: the more they worked to decipher the error, the more alarms they set off, so that the whole room blinked and chirped and shrieked as system after system locked up.

And all the while, vibrations wracked the Ark. How long until the Sovereign Swarm breached the hull? Without access to the ship’s external sensors, they could only guess.

Yarsi drifted through this rabid, desperate chaos with Laykis limping at her side. She passed by xenos, sweating and cursing at their desks, xenos arguing and blaming each other, spitting vicious insults. She paused, briefly, as two redenites with their heads bowed together hurried across her path. Yarsi ignored the glares and snarls and sneers of the tinkers and engineers who demanded that she get out of the way. She walked, as if in a dream—because she had dreamed all this before.

On the one hand, she was afraid. How was she supposed to help here? Until now, Yarsi had only done what she had seen Khadam do, before her. Press this button, and whisper this command, and the ship ran through its pre-ordained motions. But to actually bring the Ark across the stars? If a hundred of Gaiam’s smartest engineers couldn’t figure it out, she was hopeless.

Then, there were the memories. Someone else’s memories. They laid over her mind, like spider webs blanketing the leaves of a fern. The memories shaped her thoughts, and gave her ideas that she knew—she knew—were correct.

Her feet carried her automatically up the steps to the command platform, where the thickest tangle of redenites and cyrans fought and jostled and frowned at the screens, still shouting that one error. Two crowds had formed on either side of the central console. But it was not redenites against cyrans. Instead, the tinkers and engineers had blended, and found new alliances among strangers, and now the mixed sides argued like old rivals. Queen Ryke stood to the side, trying to shout over all of them, to batter them into silence so she could regain control. It was not working.

Thunder shook the Ark, shaking dust from the ceiling, and still they pointed and shouted at each other across the central console. I’ve seen this before.

She heard nothing they said. In truth, she could barely hear herself anymore over the brightness of the memories. What am I?

She knew the answer. She didn’t know the answer. She couldn’t tell which thoughts belonged to her, and which thoughts belonged to the other. This is not my body.

These are not my memories.

It felt as though her head might split in two, and the battle between the engineers helped not at all.

“Go on,” Laykis urged, a metal hand pressing softly into her back. “He said you would know.”

None of them noticed as the lassertane girl strode down the center of the platform, and reached for the console (this is not my hand, these are not my scales) and she began, with someone else’s confidence, the process.

A warm, soothing tone chimed through the room, vibrating from the floor and rising to the curved ceiling. All the panels on the walls started to glow as new screens came to life, and light etched into the consoles that encircled the platform.

“Welcome, NEW USER. Please enter your NAME.”

The crowds of scientists, engineers, and even the guards, turned to stare at her. Mouths open wide—eyes, even wider. The Queen clasped her hands to her heart, her great golden eyes falling on the lassertane.

Yarsi shivered. The sudden attention alone threatened to crush her. But so too did the realization that she could no longer answer: who am I? What is my name?

Not my hands… Not my body…

“Yarsi…” the Queen’s voice interrupted her thoughts. Somewhere, uncomfortably close, a boom shook the ship, causing the whole Bridge to lurch. When she regained her balance, Yarsi found a hundred stern, worried faces watching her. Waiting. A hundred impatient voices, murmuring about how she should proceed. As if any of them know.

Cold metal fingers squeezed her shoulder. The android’s eyes glowed with a gentle, golden light. Her ancient mask, scarred and corroded, lowered so that Yarsi could hear her over the rattling and shaking as drumfire hammered the Ark’s hull.

“I once had a sister,” Laykis said. “Who was full of wisdom. Some gifted to her by the gods themselves, instilled in her at birth. But the rest she fought for, and earned on her journey. And once, when I was lost on my own journey, she taught me how to leave parts of myself behind—the parts that I no longer needed. I was afraid to change myself, lest I unraveled the work of the Maker who made me. She taught me otherwise. It doesn’t matter who you are, only what you do.”

Yarsi knew what to do. But when she stepped up the console, she hesitated with her hand hovering over the smooth metal orb (which her memories told her was something called an interface). She could feel the Ark, through the memory device implanted in her spine. She could feel it tugging at her thoughts.

She could feel its strength. Back on Sen’s World, Yarsi had worked with old repulsor carts, helping the keepers move the bee hives from one roost to another. She had crawled in the mirror-houses, cleaning out gears and delicate motors, so they could turn and spread the warmth from the Light Below. And on Gaiam, she had worked with more machines, constructs, and printed gadgets than she could name.

All were stones and rocks, compared to the inner workings of the Ark.

Yarsi let out a steadying breath. She reached for the Ark, and the Ark reached back. It felt like ice flowing up her wrist, and burying into her scales. It found her nerves, and rode them up her spine. She slammed her eyes shut, gritting her fangs until her teeth creaked against each other. The crawling ice threaded through her veins, and into her spine, making her arch her back, her tail curling painfully, making her claws grip the console even tighter.

Freezing agony threatened to black out all her thoughts, all sensation. Stay awake, she urged herself. Stay awake—until she couldn’t form the thought anymore, and clung to consciousness with a sheer force of will.

Then, the Ark’s system crawled into her brain.

“Unexpected brain architecture detected.” It flashed, as if the words were written on the backs of her eyelids.

The Ark’s interface was not designed for a xeno like her. It pierced cruelly into her mind, growing and digging. She gasped as burning pools of frost bloomed inside her skull. Frozen claws plucked and pulled at her mind, searching and grasping—and not finding. The Ark knew her mind completely, and it found her lacking.

Blood trickled warmly from her nostrils, and from her gums, where her fangs sank into her own flesh. Her eyes rolled as she fought, clenched, and thrashed against the interface as the Ark tore her mind apart.

The Ark was divine. Made for a Maker. She had gotten it this far, but this was nothing. I am not worthy.

She could feel the Ark’s systems, fuzzy and unclear. She could sense the Machine Swarm, pummeling and smashing and throwing itself at the Hull. Testing its strength. Burning through its shields, scratching at its metal.

It doesn’t matter who you are.

Please, she prayed. Let me be worthy.

She let go of herself. And the Ark poured in.

Yarsi’s eyes shot open—all ten million of them. She saw the Bridge. And a hundred glowing outlines: the engineers and tinkers and scientists and guards. Data poured down their silhouettes, identifying them, measuring every motion. Too much.

She felt thousands of machines crawling over her hull, needling and digging and scraping and cutting as the shields—her shields—struggled to burn them away. She could feel millions more of them, buzzing in the air around the Ark like some great plague vomited up by the endless hells, locusts sent to gorge themselves upon her body. She could feel the planet below, and she could feel the great demons, immense carriers and unholy machine heads, droning far above.

Too much. Foam dripped from her mouth. The lights inside the Ship were too bright. Her eyes, Yarsi’s eyes, wouldn’t shut.

She felt a great, surging power coursing through her keel-belly. The Ark’s monstrous engines thrummed with energy. They waited for her command. They wanted her command.

“Go,” Yarsi tried to say. And though the word didn’t leave her lips, the Ark heard. The engines bloomed, sending the floor up with a force great enough to throw everyone—everyone but Yarsi—off their feet. Her hull shuddered, and groaned, and fought against the invisible grip of the planet. Her massive repulsors burned molten craters into the city, turning the bricks and houses into bubbling, blackened froth.

Too much! Yarsi screamed. Nothing came out.

“Look!” someone shouted. Screens lit up the curving walls of the Bridge, showing an outside view of the ship. Inch by grinding inch, the ship gained altitude. The engineers climbed to their feet, chattering nervously about the mass of machines that gathered on the Ark’s hull. The Swarm chained itself together, creating unholy tails that clung to the belly of the ship, dragging at her, igniting tens of thousands of their own repulsors to reverse her motion. To bring her down, and bury her on the planet.

“Burn them,” Laykis’ voice clicked urgently in Yarsi’s ear, and again in her audio sensors. “Use the shields and burn them off.”

But Yarsi could only shake her head. She didn’t know how. The Ark was alien to her. Its thousands of systems—arcane and unknowable. She had gotten this far by luck. She was drowning in ignorance, and no one could tell her how to swim. The bulkheads groaned, and the struts creaked and popped. The Ark’s ascent slowed. The Swarm’s chains grew longer and above, the greater demons crept ever closer. She felt their huge bodies, pregnant with machine-brood, gathering to block her path.

“You must,” Laykis said.

I can’t, Yarsi wanted to say.

The android’s metal fingers tightened around her arm with a cold shock that almost snapped her out of the Ark’s interface. For a moment, Yarsi could almost see Laykis through the brilliant blur of the Bridge’s lights. “I sat at his feet,” Laykis’s voice clicked insistently, “I listened to his voice. The Savior Divine saw this moment, and more. My faith will never falter again. Take from me this only thing I have left to give, Yarsi. This certainty in His words: All she has, and more, will be demanded of the Mute. And the Seer will give it. It’s in you, Yarsi. Give it to yourself.”

The great demons blotted out the sun. Gravity dragged the Ark down, and chains swayed from her flared aft to her speared tip.

I am not worthy. I don’t have the power.

But her father, the Bloodchief of a thriving band of scavengers, had always taught her that survival required you to focus on what you have, rather than what you lack.

Yarsi brushed her fingers (my fingers) across the memory implant embedded in her spinal column. She might not know herself anymore, but she knew this: the person inside her had done great things once.

What can we remember?

She remembered the first time she saw the Light. Nobody believed her that it was a living thing. Nobody believed her, when she said it had shown her everything.

But I knew everything would change.

She remembered the way her mind burned when the Light—Anu—filled her thoughts with vast universes of understanding. The past. The future. She had seen it. She had seen too much.

She had a thought, back then. And she had it again now: I am no longer myself. I am forever changed.

Yarsi knew where this path lead. But what choice did she have? The living can only try to delay the inevitable. The memories inside Yarsi called an image to the front of her mind: a planet overgrown with dark red vegetation, and blue-black oceans. A handful of broken moons, overgrown with ancient infrastructure, orbited this old world.

And I am somewhere else.

The Ark responded. First, it drained all the thoughts out of her skull. Then, when there was nothing left, it sapped the strength from her limbs. Her fingers weakened, her legs buckled. Her joints strained as her muscles spasmed, curling her toes and fingers into agonizing oblivion. Blood dripped from her nostrils and her eyes, and filled her throat until she started to choke. She slumped over the console, clinging to it even as it sapped the very beat from her heart. It burned. She could smell her own flesh, cooking as the Ark’s energy poured through her—trying to understand her impulse, not understanding, and pumping more energy into her unworthy form.

Please, She urged it with the last shred of her thought. Jump.

The Ark jumped.

***

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