Heliophage: Episode 6, 2120-07-06 (Patreon)

Encrusted with mud, I crawled from a stagnant ditch onto sun-baked  asphalt, my claws scraping trenches into the warm tar. I shook mud and  other debris from my back and found myself unable to care about the  sound of a rusted metal plate falling from my shattered body.

I basked in the sun, mud-caked and exhausted. A parody of the first ancient fish to have the idea to step onto dry land.

I crawled along the road, low enough to the ground that I was lost amid  the shells of the endless traffic. Occasionally the vehicles were so  dense that I had to scrabble over cars, their rusted suspension  screeching as my weight bore down on them.

During one such ungainly clamber, I placed my foot onto the roof of a  large car only to realise, too late, that my weight was on the sun roof  of the vehicle. Ancient rubber crumbled as the glass dropped into the  cabin and cracked in half. I peered through the hole at the entombed  driver and their passenger, both reduced to little more than dried husks  topped with expressionless, mummified faces. As I slid back down to  street level, I noticed that the two corpses were holding hands and felt  a pang of guilt for opening their resting place to the elements.

Moving along the traffic, I saw that most of the vehicles were empty,  many with their doors open. People had abandoned their vehicles once  they realised that this traffic was never going to move again. I suppose  that the few bodies that I spotted were the remains of those who were  too hungry or weak to continue on foot or perhaps they had just ran out  of hope for life elsewhere.

Occasionally, I would come across the hulks of larger vehicles on the  road. Vast, cockpitless, automated haulers towing trains of containers,  some of which showed signs of looting with vast drifts of materials  spilling from their gaping doors.

These containers seemed to mostly contain esoteric mechanical parts or  electrical components and some of the trucks had vast rolls of tarnished  sheet metal lashed to their beds.

Trudging through the debris, my mind almost entirely absent, I shuddered  awake at a surreal sight that I, at first, took to be some kind of  hallucination. My leg appeared to be slipping and scraping, trying to  find purchase on a sliding pile of itself. By this I mean that the floor  appeared to my made entirely of disembodied legs identical to my own  but orange.

Drawing back the veil of mindlessness, I took in my surroundings. One of  the truck containers had its doors flung open and wooden crates had  been smashed and overturned. Nothing appeared to be missing, the piles  of parts were immense and accounted for the entire container’s load. It  struck me that these boxes were turned out purposefully to be left in  the dirt. Someone had gone to great effort to waste and spoil these  parts intended for bodies much like mine.

The bright orange paint of these legs, which contrasted to the cold  blue-grey of my own, was dulled by dirt and sun exposure but otherwise  intact, showing no signs of use.

I kicked at one of the legs immediately before me; although rusted and  filthy, it was in much better condition than my own. The tungsten-alloy  tip of my foot was chipped, dented and bowed with its point rounded from  wear. Each of these hundreds of legs were in similar condition, their  oiled feet still sharp enough to cut clean lines through paper.

I stood on two barely functioning legs with a third uselessly trailing  behind me and a fourth abandoned in the seats of the stadium an entire  sea away, and began to laugh. Great, burbling sounds of digital noise  from my speakers and random firings of the complex net of functions that  made up my mind. I gazed upon this flood of perfectly good legs that I  was but a screwdriver and a friend away from being able to use. A  fractal pattern overlaid my hysteria-blurred vision and I let the  laughter turn into a great, self-pitying bellow of rage.

At the noise, crows took flight, silhouetted against the morning sun. I  watched as they beat their wings, lifting their weight like they were  made of nothing. The video feed paused imperfectly, the occasional frame  of motion sliding erratically forward or looping. These video glitches  became less frequent until my vision, and mind, dimmed to nothing.

—

The next time I was fully conscious, I had moved kilometres down the  river of traffic. The locomotion routines in my failing carcass were  indomitable; no matter how many legs remained functional and no matter  what condition said legs were in, part of my mind would force them to  drag me forever forward.

Head-sagging in exhaustion, my camera feed was a sea of asphalt.  Occasional drifts of sand encroaching onto roadway carving out a parched  shoreline against the black sea. The twinkle of jagged islands of  broken glass.

Each step forward felt like it was draining the very last of my power  reserves. My mind fragmenting with each jerky lunge and reforming in the  moments of still between steps.

The need to rest fell upon me like a tonne weight, a sudden, urgent  fatigue that was all-consuming. My mind pushed on for longer than my  body but the dead weight of the physical was impervious to mental  conviction.

I gently lowered my bulk to the ground - a movement that always made me  picture a camel coming to rest - and fixed my head level with the  horizon. I instinctively tilted my body southward, to maximise sun  exposure on my scratched solar panels.

—

I awoke to motion. It was dawn, the sun close to the horizon and casting  long shadows. The silhouette of something four-legged was standing atop  a car, it was joined by others, their shadows stretching them into  long-legged caricature. They emitted noises that coaxed something primal  from the deeper, human part of my mind but I struggled to find the  mental label for the sound that would let context fall into place.

As my camera adjusted itself to the bright light, I could make out  details of these animals, four-legged and long-muzzled with bright,  intelligent eyes. My human mind offered the word ’wolf’ but retracted it  in favour of ’dog’ but with little conviction.

Surfacing from deep memory, I recalled that “Rewilding” was a popular  term in environmentalist circles in the hopeful days before the climate  catastrophe. Climate change transformed from some distant, “what-if”  bogeyman to something that was smashing your home and scattering your  people.

The animals seemed to be a small pack or, perhaps, family; the first  animal I spotted was almost certainly a wolf or some breed so close to  wolf that the distinction was unclear. The second largest animal read,  to my mind as “dog” but I would be unable to pick out a clear  characteristic that would establish its dogness. The smaller members of  the pack, the pups, were even more complexly varied. Mottled, mongrel  coats and varied distributions of muscle and bone that whispered of past  heritage.

One of the pups moved closer to my camera, sniffing at a dried fragment  of bone which may have once been a human femur. It sniffed through a  collapsed muzzle; a slightly stunted, wrinkled nose. A throwback to  somewhere on its family tree where humans would proudly label their  creation ’bulldog’.

This wolf/dog distinction was revealed as anachronistic, anthropocentric  nonsense. In the absence of humans, the concept of ’domesticated’ was  irrelevant. In the absence of humans, all dogs were wolves. Rewilding.

—

When I was next aware, I was moving. The pack could have been a dream  until my labouring forelegs dragged me past a car, it’s red sun-bleached  bonnet’s dust showing a light trail of paw-prints.

I looked across the fields to the north, the direction that the pack had  been heading, and was astonished to see a wildly different scene to my  time crawling through muddy furrows. Either time or distance - I had no  way of measuring either - had turned this once, lush farmland into  wind-blown dust. Even the hardier, deep rooted weeds that I had passed  previously were now looking dry, sick and sun-scorched.

I slowly surveyed the still scene, noting nothing in these dusty wastes  other than the occasional tumble-down structure or broken piece of  machinery.

Remembering the view from the uplands of a land criss-crossed by rivers I  was astounded at the complete lack of even a trickle of a stream or  puddle of standing water. Perhaps I had turned off route and was now  lost in a different landscape. That was possible but unlikely, I was  still marching endlessly into the sunrise; due East.

No, the much more likely explanation, despite its tremendous  implications, was that while I walked - and more probably while I slept -  the deserts of southern Europe had advanced.

The desertification of the continent saddened me more than the deaths of  humans; if we were killed by our own hubris, so be it, cause and effect  finds a balance. But leaving a planet unable to recover from our  mistakes is an obscene overstep that mere extinction does nothing to  redeem.

—

When I next awoke, my rage and shame somewhat abated, I raised my  sagging head to see the horizon filled with a vast concrete wall. I  quickened my pace in excitement, weaving through the wrecks of cars and  clambering over any that directly blocked my path.

As I got closer to this sky-blotting edifice, I was finally at the head of the seemingly endless traffic jam.

The first few vehicles in the queue were burnt-out ruins but what  interested me were the more intact vehicles farther back along the road.  They had huge, fist-sized holes punched through their bodywork and most  were missing their glass. Many had broken and battered bodies strewn  about their interiors.

I hauled myself onto the bonnet of one of these pock-marked cars and  peered through one such hole. Something had passed through the metalwork  of the bonnet, through part of the engine, and had torn apart the lower  chassis. There were now-solid globules of metal which had been  liquefied by whatever force had created such an impact.

I turned, my bulk scraping on the car’s body, and looked in the  direction from which the projectile must have come, and was shocked.

Atop the wall, now draped over the crenellations of a concrete parapet  was a sprawled body much like my own. Its front legs dangled, feet  slowly swaying in the light breeze and its head scraped against the  rough concrete making a rasping sound in the otherwise silent scene. It  was painted olive green with various stencils an decals covering its  surfaces. Its body was identical to my own other than colour and  payload; rather than a pilot’s cabin, this machine was topped with a  gimbal-mounted gun. It was a complex arrangement of tubes and feeds  around a wide-bored barrel that was pointed right at me.

I initially froze, thinking my military brother was about to leap into  action and pepper me with supersonic heavy-metal slugs, but it remained  motionless, dead. A rust stain several metres long had dripped down the  great wall over the decades and the remains of past seasons’ bird nests  could be seen amongst the looping cables and ammo feeds of the weapon.

I allowed my body to collapse onto the battle-damaged car and lamented;  neither the flesh forebears of my first body nor the metallic siblings  of my second were without sin. Technology has always been a tool to  extend humanity’s reach, and their evil.

Here I was, a winding-down, broken tool of a civilisation whose time was  long past. What better place for my grave as a battlefield upon which  humans had been slaughtered by their own machines.

I switched off my motive systems, tired, buckled legs finally falling  limp, then shut off my camera and prepared to spend my final moments  listening to the wind blow through this quiet world.

I silenced or shut down all of my subsystems, aiming to be left with  nothing but the core of my mind, the spark of consciousness to meditate  on the whistling wind until my batteries died.

I was shutting down one of my final subsystems, my radio, when I noticed  something. A single beacon blazing in the silence of the radio  spectrum. As I turned my attention to it my mind unpacked and decoded  the signal. A signal that triggered my slumbering systems to wake into  full-alert.

“Licensed service and repair centre in 1.3km, please attend for urgent maintenance.”