Heliophage: Episode 4, 2118-03-14 (Patreon)

I

The roaring sea behind me, I tentatively hobbled to the silhouetted treeline. My limbs moved slower than I expected, their grease dried and the ravages of sand and salt water wreaking slow havoc on my joints and actuators. A software analogue of pain interrupted my every thought to demand that seek help at my nearest service centre, located in "Null".

As the trees came into focus, I could see that their darkness wasn't just an artefact of them being backlit, but they were, i3n fact, charred husks of dead trees. Forest fires are normal in northern Europe, all part of the natural process of renewal - even if many of the fires in my final years in the flesh were huge, difficult to control and ever-encroaching on human lives. From the ashes of even the worst fires sprung wildflowers and saplings and the remaining trees, no longer crowded, reached their verdant fingers to the life-giving sun, taking advantage of their newfound space.

This burnt forest was different, the floor was the monochrome grays of ash, seemingly undisturbed by rain, let alone new growth.

I cautiously pushed between two trees, flinching my face - and remaining eye - away from any hint of contact. As my flank touched the rightmost tree, the charred bark crumbled away like layers of dry paper and alighted on the slight sea breeze. The tree itself near-soundlessly bucked and slowly fell, light and charcoal-dry, landing in the ash with a muffled thud. The air was filled with swirling clouds of particulate dust.

My forelegs sank through the drifts of ash and into the soil beneath; a dry, sandy soil that barely had moisture enough to hold together.

Taking ponderous steps deeper into the dead forest stirred up great vortices of ash. The air was so thick that it felt like the dead trees around me were re-enacting their final, smoke-filled moments.

I darkly mused that I was lucky that I no longer needed to breathe. Bitter laughter formed in my mind, bounced around my hardware looking for a mouth through which it could escape, and finally satisfied itself by becoming a searing scroll of error logs.

I stumbled, feeling drunk, my mind feeling crammed into the few functioning systems my body retained.

As I walked deeper into the burned forest, the sound of the waves lessened until I could no longer be sure if I could hear them at all. The dominant sound was now an eerie whistling of the wind through the charred sentinels of the ragged tree trunks. 

I don't know when I stopped hearing gulls but, once I did notice, I realised that there was no birdsong at all. Not just birdsong but no other sign of animal, or even plant, life.

Occasionally I would stumble over an occluded rock or the rare intact root and I was unable to act fast enough to regain my balance. I would fall like a stringless puppet into the mercifully soft ash and lie, cursing my ruined form, until I could muster the resolve to stand.

I found that I was increasingly unable find the will to continue.

II

My GPS couldn't find enough satellites to reliably pinpoint my location and my compass flipped alarmingly between the cardinal directions with no discernible pattern so I was reduced to celestial navigation. If I had ever known how to navigate by the sun and the stars with any certainty, that knowledge now lay rotting in the helmet-clad skull of the corpse tethered to my back. 

The best navigation that I could muster was deciding on a roughly easterly path which meant shuffling towards the sunrise. This decision at first seemed arbitrary but I now realise that, like all life before me, I was naturally drawn towards my staple food source. The thought of futilely dragging my mechanical carcass ever eastward around the globe to find the source of the sunrise elicited another laugh. It bubbled up from deep in my mind and ended in a series of optical glitches and a sharp audio fuzz.

I didn't sleep as such but I did stop in the hours of absolute darkness, my remaining camera unable to switch to infrared. Seeing nothing but a rectangle of blackness, the noise from my broken sensors seemed just as real as the featureless live video. My thermographic camera's signal occasionally flashed with random patterns. I captured a single frame from it and enhanced the image. Fractal starbursts of hot red and ice cold blue caught like photographed fireworks.

I also heard things. Snaps of twigs or something dragging itself through the ash. I heard snippets of sound that, when enhanced, could be voices. It could also be wind or interference on my microphone's cables.

Every night I stood, playing with hallucinations while trying to convince myself that the wind was speaking to me.

After some time I realised that could no longer accurately gauge the passing of time. When I introspected, there was no longer the pervasive ticking of my system clock and my memory was so unreliable that I couldn't even guess the number of day-night cycles that had elapsed.

Sometime into my walk through this seemingly endless forest I had lost my mind.

The click-click-click of the clawed tips of my legs twisted into the trot of a horse. This was blended with my happy memories of watching the horse races as a child - I refused to recall the final horrific memory of the last race I saw. I instead focused on the powerful slabs of muscle rolling under their skin, the roar of the ecstatic crowds at the spectacle or the smell of earth mixed with sweet animal musk.

The fantasy of embracing my horse-nature buoyed my mood and I was soon clumsily cantering through the dead forest, kicking up clouds of ash. I did not care when I slid, fell or smashed through a tree trunk in a rain of charred wood fragments.

I was overjoyed at the rolling sound of my darting limbs as they hammered into the forest floor. I felt powerful and free but there was a sickening undercurrent where I couldn't ignore the odd-numbered rhythm of my steps. 123, 123, 1-2-3

I couldn't let myself slow, I forced myself to keep charging forward, the blackened wood blurring past me as a galloped. No imagined stampede this time but a pure, solo feat of endurance.

I had lost the sun but I didn't care, I charged ahead heedless of any route.

III

I had shot past the trunk before I could notice the figure crouched behind it. I panicked, didn't slow but rather drew myself around in a broad semicircle, kicking up a crescent plume of ash.

The lens of my camera, crusted with salt and smeared with filth, could barely make out the shape but it stood in stark contrast to the skinny verticals of the burned trees. It wasn't moving but it could be a human, it was the right size.

I slowed as I approached, tilting my head to avoid the glare of the sunset against which it was silhouetted, sparkles of lens-flare dancing across my vision. I couldn't see any detail but my mind filled it in nevertheless. There, crouched behind a trunk of a tree was the racecourse vet; his long, beige coat trailing behind him, his old-fashioned doctor's bag set aside and the greasy, gray metal of his heavy revolver pointed with it's black-hole bore staring at me.

I attempted to throw all of my weight backwards to get away from this apparition and with an insectile, very unhorselike reconfiguration of my legs I leapt away. I barrelled from the vet, slashing with my raised forelegs to smash aside trunks that blocked my path. The pilot on my back, now coated with fine powder, bounced against the tight straps.

I thudded into something solid and didn't take the moment to see whether it was a thick stump or a pursuing human. I merely set off at a full sprint in the other direction.

With each slashing step, fragments of oxidised metal flaked from my mechanisms but I paid it no heed. I wasn't meat, I could push through joints full of grinding debris and choose to silence the screaming pain messages.

I was pushing my systems to capacity and my battery monitor was yelling about overheating. Hot copper circuit traces warped and lifted, shorts and unshielded discharges garbling signals between my systems. 

As I ran, the black uprights of the scorched trees against the white glare of the sky began to look like snatches of barcode.

The moment that the thought occurred to me, a long-dormant imaging system came to life and began crunching through the blurry frames of black and white verticals in an attempt to parse the data they held.

The trees' thick and thin black bars were now overlaid with endless streams of random junk data, their check digits never validating any true values. The forest was a cacophony of data.

Many of these cryptic codes could be made to form words, if you were creative. I could have sworn that I saw the word "monster", missing its "e" and jumbled with some random punctuation characters. And the word "death" repeated three and a half times in the middle of a long string of nines.

I was aware of a thick tangle of trunks ahead of me and shoved my three sharp feet into the ground to turn some momentum into a jagged tear in the ground. I turned, slowing just enough to make out the vague, human-sized shape moving from the dry copse.

My dirty, low-fidelity vision could ascertain nothing by my mind happily filled in the blank. The vet was taking aim with his heavy revolver, face blank as he sadly put down the sick animal in front of him.

I still had the wits to assume the ghost was a feverish delusion but that didn't stop me from diving to the ground in terror when I heard the gunshot - whether the sound came from my microphones or from inside my mind was moot.

I scrabbled to my feet and charged onwards, my battered limbs a blur, until the black and white lines of the skyline merged into a dull gray and nothing seemed physical. I was distantly aware of the impacts from running through ashen trees.

The ghost of the racetrack vet could no longer haunt me if I was moving too fast to make him out. Let my rotting mind invent whatever it wanted, I was living my own reality of motion in a fluid, quicksilver smear.

I relished this moment of near-ecstatic disassociation from the physical world until my overheating motive systems overrode my imperative to motion and shut themselves down.

I glided through the air, legs trailing behind me and landed in a drift of ash, my camera half-buried. I was confused at a hissing sound until I saw smoke rising from where my red-hot chassis was scorching the ground in which it lay.

Looking ahead, through ash and smoke, I could make out a figure. Had I eyelids, I would have blinked tightly in an attempt to dispel this spectre but I could only stare ahead at this impossible human.

It stepped towards me and the grainy image swam and blurred to keep up with the motion. I was acutely aware of the individual pixels of the image, of the limitations of my window onto the real world.

As the figure came closer, my mind tried to attach an identity to it. The phantom racecourse vet's features faded as more detail came into focus. The figure wore something long and flowing, reminding me of the dresses my mother would wear in the summers before we had to leave our home. The fabric split, however, it was a cape rather than a dress and the body beneath was clad in dirty-looking olive green.

It swung something from off of it's shoulder and shouted - a gruff man's voice - in a language I did not understand.

Could I speak? At this thought, I was aware of the speaker array in my head.

The man lifted the object he had taken from his shoulder with both hands and sighted along it. It was some kind of rifle.

Desperate, I attempted to speak, engaging the speakers with a click followed by my pitiful begging for mercy. My voice, such as it was, was the burbling, digital squeal of an ancient modem. My thoughts turned to sounds that no human could understand.

As the figure stepped slowly forward, weapon raised, he came into my fixed focus and I could see him clearly. He had thrown back a heavy, woollen, ash-stained cape to reveal a dirty, patched outfit of mismatched military clothing. What I could see of his face beyond the aimed rifle was a slash of pinkish, dry skin between a wild mane of lank, matted hair and a thick beard that reached to his waist. One eye was closed in a tight slash while the other started madly down the length of the rifle, showing an alarming amount of yellowed white around the dark iris.

I tried to speak again, telling him that I was weak and hurt and meant no harm but digital nonsense continued to burble from my speakers.

The man was motionless apart from the minute trembling of his finger on the trigger of the gun. He squeezed.

The report of the gun was deafening in the silent forest and fragments of my forward armour sheared away from the bullet's impact.

I continued imploring him to help me but I couldn't form human words and, even if I could, would they be in a language that this man understood?

He yanked back the lever on the hunting rifle and a shell casing ejected.

I babbled in machine code as my overheated chassis cooled.

He squeezed again. Another loud crack followed by a bullet piercing the shoulder of the limp corpse on my back.

My motive systems came back online. I immediately leapt; my forelimbs raised like the legs of a hunting spider. I deftly flicked the tip of one leg while I was still in the air, slashing through fabric, flesh and bone alike and sending the rifle clattering to the floor. As I landed, I thrust forward with my pointed forelegs piercing his shoulders before my tonnes of weight pinned him to the ground.

The man, now seeming tiny and insignificant, was screaming, blood-flecked spittle landing on his dirty beard. Screams turned to terrified muttering and then the unmistakable cadence of prayer. He closed his eyes and slowed his murmuring, and finally stopped, mid-sentence, and gave one last wheezing breath. 

I tried to say "I'm sorry" in these final moments but my speaker translated my thoughts to a warbling static.

My mind failing, my body ruined, I collapsed atop the corpse of my attacker and slept.