Heliophage: Episode 3 (Patreon)

I

I had been carefully keeping watch for some time.

At first it was easy, but boring viewing. The sun beat  down on my solar panels as I floated in the sea, keeping my remaining  cells at maximum charge.

Initial experimenting with my legs led me to conclude that  they were next to useless in the water. No longer waterlogged and  sinking, I couldn't walk the sea floor but, instead, bobbed on the  surface and was at the mercy of the currents and wind, my legs reduced  to rudimentary rudders.

Life at sea was meditative. I hoped for land and a  continuation of my journey but the days of staring at the wobbling  horizon gave me time to think about why. What was I hoping to find? And,  when I found it, what then?

I supposed that I was following the natural instinct of  humans to band together. I was holding out hope that some people had  survived and that I could rejoin some semblance of society. Loneliness  and lack of human interaction couldn't be healthy for my mind.

But then there was the problem of my current physical  state. How might other humans react to a shambling machine - broken and  rusted - bearing aloft on it's carapace the body of an unmoving human.  What acknowledgement of humanity would I be granted? Would I be  accepted, ignored or feared?

I could much more easily imagine others seeing me as a  monster or an abomination than I could see them welcoming me with open  arms.

All these hypotheticals were, of course, predicated on my  baseless, near-religious belief that there must be humans somewhere. I  would not allow myself to entertain the alternative.

My grainy, salt-crusted camera would, at times, pick out  the ghost of land to the south. I couldn't allow myself to trust it,  between the damaged camera, corrupted software and failing mind. I  couldn't be sure of seeing something until I could see it clearly and  beyond a doubt.

My mind was failing. I could feel it. I was sure of it but  without the foil of other intellects to test against, I couldn't judge,  trapped as I was, inside it.

On still nights, I saw lights to the south but the more  that I tried to focus on them, the less sure I was of their source or  even their existence. My camera was jammed at some relatively close  focus and anything distant kaleidoscoped into constellations of visual  artefacts destroying any sense of form.

Moments like this left me feeling weak, alone, useless and  small. I hated myself for having hope that these pinpricks of light  were signs of life. I found myself in a state of mind that I dimly  remembered from the time of flesh. I was desolate and the tension in my  mind was demanding the release of great, heaving sobs; an action that my  cruel joke of a body could not provide.

II

When the vague outline of the coast was validated by the  gentle lapping sound of a light surf and the screeching of gulls, I  could finally trust my senses and allow myself some hope. I was sure of  the existence of this land and my mental anguish now switched from  despair to frustrated impatience as the current dragged me in a  perpendicular path tantalisingly close to the shore. For days, I was  mere steps away from the beach but the current would not give me up to  the waves.

They say that you should be careful what you wish for.

One dark, calm evening adrift, I was introspecting,  piecing together fragments of recent and distant memories - both machine  and flesh - trying to pass them through the engine of emotion and  attain that elusive, fleeting sense of self; the grain of sand around  which the pearl of identity crystallises.

I was yanked from the depths of my mind by an arc of  lightening tearing through the sky and illuminating the now-choppy sea.  The booming report of the thunder immediately followed, placing the  storm directly atop me. The stars were no longer visible, dark clouds  blotting them out and, all at once, the sky dropped its payload. The  white noise cacophony of heavy rain was added to the increasingly  violent-sounding breaking of waves.

Sudden swell tossed me like a child's toy as the sea  undulated - each fall momentarily submerging me in a moment of blind,  muffled calm before throwing me up into the deafening,  lightening-illuminated chaos of the storm.

An impact shuddered through my frame as the swell  deposited me atop the slimy bulk of a partially-submerged boulder. The  sea lifted me and slammed me against it repeatedly the water twisting in  a vortex around the stone. Focussing on timing I planted my three legs  against the stone and shoved upwards, pre-empting the water returning to  sweep me off.

I leapt off the boulder towards the shoreline, and  splashed into a breaking wave. I tried to orient myself but there was no  point of reference. Every time I found purchase with a foot, the water  would drag me from it or the sand and silt below me would be lifted with  the water, providing no foothold.

I tumbled and was battered by both water and debris. All I could think was that I would soon be on land and I held that thought tightly as I passed out.

III

I didn't have enough power in my remaining cells to stand,  or even stay awake for extended periods, but I could take a single  frame from my camera every few hours and contemplate it as I lay,  embedded in the silt, mud and seaweed of the beach.

The low-resolution, grainy pictures showed very little  difference hour-on-hour; the only movement being the sun casting longer  shadows as the days progressed and the advance of the scavenging sea  birds working their way along the line of fetid organic detritus stirred  up by the storm.

The days were again calm and bright but my solar panels  were entirely covered and I was subsisting the merest trickle of charge  from my remaining batteries.

I contemplated death. The ruggedness of my construction  usually meant that I would, eventually, be exposed to the sun and  trickle-charge enough to continue some semblance of operation but my  current situation seemed final. I would lie on this shore and have more  silt deposited atop me until nothing remained. Perhaps some future  archaeologists would uncover the fossilised bones of the pilot and the  loose pile of rusted parts that made up my structure but, more likely, I  would lie unnoticed until the planet itself is was destroyed.

The latest still from the camera was dominated by the face  of a gull peering into the lens. Ribbons of seaweed hung from its beak  and its left eye was forced closed by some cancerous-looking growth.

Successive pictures showed the bird picking over the foul debris long after the other gulls had departed.

It was seemingly unable to fly, the feathers of one of its  wings jutting out at various angles, and its odd, tilted stance made  sense when a later photograph showed the gnarled lump that served it as a  right foot.

This bird, abandoned by its kind, hobbled around the beach, subsisting on scraps.

The next picture, at first, seemed to show only darkness  but the bottom edge of the frame was partially covered with something  fibrous. With nothing else to examine, I concentrated on making sense of  it until it clicked into place. It was the plumage of the gull as it  roosted in my head.

Hope sprung to my mind and, were I able, I would have  laughed at myself pinning my last hopes on some stupid, diseased bird.  This bird was scouring the shoreline for anything to eat. Perhaps its  disease, injury or deformity rendered it unable to hunt and it would  devour any edible scraps it found.

My power depleting, I made the choice to forego my  external senses and to fall into a state of hibernation. I would disable  all other processes other than the tiny fragment of being at the core  of my mind. The "I am" portion. The simple attention that persists when  all other thought have departed. Eventually this too would fail but that  gentle oblivion no longer held any fear - this wasn't some deathbed  enlightenment, it was just that fear uses a lot of electricity.

Everything slowed.

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed but I  was yanked out of deep hibernation by an excited chirping from the  charging subsystem. A fraction of a percent of the solar panel was now  exposed to light. Not enough wattage to power the subsystem that would  charge my batteries but any change was astounding.

I waited.

A full 1 percent of the solar panel had been exposed to the sun, reaching minimum operational level.

I took the risk of spending resources on querying the batteries and was astounded to find them slowly charging.

I waited.

I don't know how long I waited.

I then had enough power to start a timer.

I waited months.

My impulsiveness nearly knocked me back into complete  unconsciousness but I had to see. I send a burst of electricity to the  camera and a single, partially-glitched frame of video was made  available to me. The beach was empty. My hope returned. Faith even. That  pitiful gull was on my back, pulling potential morsels of food from my  solar panel.

I was alarmed to see that taking the photo and allowing  myself to feel emotion had already depleted most of my newfound battery  charge. I couldn't afford to do this any longer. My newfound faith in  the perseverance of life gave me the strength I needed to take the leap.

I shut myself down.

IV

It took me a moment to distinguish the sound of the sea  from the random flickering of my mind but then context dropped and I  revelled in the sounds of the sea and gulls circling overhead.

My battery cells were reading 30%, more than enough to  power on all of my systems. My mind burst back into activity, reason and  emotion again vying for control of executive functions. My vision  glared white and then resolved to a higher-resolution live video of the  muddy beach.

With great exertion of my three remaining legs I pushed  myself standing, the silt that had settled around me giving with a  sucking pop.

I bent one of my legs, tilting my body to one side, such a  simple act but one that was previously unimaginable effort. Silt and  rotten plant matter slipped off my panels and dropped onto the mud with a  splat. As I tilted to inspect the handful of dumb matter that had  almost killed me, my attention was drawn to something small and white  lying in the mud.

I zoomed in on the object and saw it resolve to the  lifeless corpse of the gull, it's tiny diseased body having, at some  point, unceremoniously rolled off my back to land, crumpled, beside me.

I extended my foreleg, caked-on mud dropping from the joints and drew the sharp point across the silt, opening a short gash.

Delicately, gently and with as much dignity as I could  afford it, I knocked the bird's body into the impromptu grave.  Concentrating, I gently tucked its buckled wings against its side and  tilted its head to a comfortable-looking angle. The gull now looked like  it was sleeping and this felt much more appropriate to me. I used the  side of my foot as an improvised shovel to close the ground over the  lifeless body of my saviour.

I stared at the disturbed ground for a moment before turning inland.

As I surveyed the long beach and the forest beyond I found that I was still unable to cry.